Today may well be the day of jokes, but if a report we’re reading is true, you won’t be laughing at what Apple has planned.
News coming from the Apple developer community is that Apple plans to increase prices for its App Store in certain regions to start April off.
MacRumors had the original story, and it cites that Apple plans to raise the prices of apps for the currencies of South Africa, India, Indonesia, Turkey, oh and this place called Australia you might have heard of.
It’s not unusual for Apple to change pricing depending on how it sees the economy is going, and given that Australia is under parity for the US dollar (though higher than Canada at the moment), it’s not terribly surprising that Apple is considering taking this step.
We checked our developer account for Apple and found the adjustment hasn’t happened yet, and have reached out to Apple to find out not just if this is true, but what the changes will be, and if it will affect media across Apple’s other platforms on iTunes, such as music and movies.
We’ll keep you updated as soon as we know more.
UPDATE (April 5): The changes are in, and the price rise is as much as 30 percent. To give you an idea, 99 cent apps now become $1.29, while $1.99 becomes $2.49, $2.99 becomes $3.79, and so on and so on.
We don’t have an official answer on why this is happening, so it leads us to believe Apple is shifting because it’s unsure about the value of the Australian dollar, but at the moment, just be thankful the price hike hasn’t affected music and movie prices, too.
So what about the last 12 months when the Aussie dollar was on parity or higher than the US dollar. It’s lame we pay more because they just want to screw us. At time of writing 93 cents US is equal to 1 dollar OZ. Hardly call for a 30% rise. I think this is just a money grab situation. They are losing market share too the likes of samsung etc. and quite simply this shows poor form and what they are about. Stocks are down let’s boost revenue.