Looks like the lash back against the high price of iPad apps has already begun – and developers are part of the charge. There have been numerous complaints about the pricing of applications on the iPad. It breaks down like this: on the iPhone, if you’re paying for an application it’ll probably cost you between $1 and $5. A lot of those apps are completely free, and the occasional app will cost more than that. But generally you don’t see something getting above 5 bucks on the app store.
But what’s this? Turns out that the bigger your screen gets, the more you get charged for apps. Entry price for apps on the iPad has been between $5 and $15. And this has annoyed a lot of people, because after you’ve forked over a minimum of 500 bucks for your big iPod, the last thing you want is to get reamed for your applications as well.
Today, there are two stories that give me a little hope:
Lonely Planet cuts prices: the iPad app for the Lonely Planet travel guide was launched at $20. It has now been dropped to $10, after numerous complaints. Lonely Planet has faced a lot of exasperation over the pricing of their digital content (it costs the same as the published books), so if even they are dropping their iPad price, that’s saying something.
Babo Crash launches at the same price: like many other iPhone games, Babo Crash has launched a HD version for the iPad. It’s a bejewelled-alike, adding a large number of new features to the King of “match 3″ games. But the developers, Playbrains Inc., have very pointedly declared that they will be selling it for the same price as on iPhone – $1. As they said themselves, it’s “a good deal since most iPad apps are between $5 and $10″
What we think?
Maybe the big boys like the New York Times can afford to charge high prices for iPad apps, but for smaller developers it will end up being suicide. A consumer might be happy to gamble $1 dollar on an unknown quantity, and won’t feel too hard done by if it turns out to be rubbish. But if you spend $10 on a game and it’s bad, then you’ll be far less likely to test those waters again.
