Well, criddell's claim is that there are a lot of people who really prefer to use Apple's payment system rather than a third-party one, such that apps that don't support Apple Pay will lose their business.
If those people really exist in large quantities (and I can believe they do!), the developer is losing business by not providing Apply Pay as an option. But that'd just lead every single customer to use Apple Pay, which is not what the developer wants. So you need to somehow give the people an incentive to choose your version, unless they really think that going through Apple is giving them a lot of value. Differential pricing seems like the most obvious way of doing that.
> Maaaaybe competition would force you to drop prices but a lot of consumer software isn't fungible and doesn't really compete on price.
That seems implausible. If you think that software prices don't matter at all, such that lowering prices does not increases sale, it'd follow that raising prices doesn't lower sales either. In that case, why hasn't the developer already raised prices?
Lowering prices probably would increase sales, but the problem is that is might also lower net profit which is the thing you actually care about. If you're a SaaS app charging $6/mo and you have a 100k MAUs then congrats $600k gross revenue per month! You lower prices to $4/mo, your users rejoice, and your sales and marketing find all the people who wouldn't buy in at $6 but would at $4 which happens to be 25k new users -- 25% growth! Amazing! Pop the Champagne! But now your gross revenue is $500k and you have more users to support.
But we weren't talking of just changing the price and keeping everything else the same. We were talking of not having to pay Apple, and passing the savings along to the consumer. With your numbers, the revenue was not 600k/month to start with. Apple was taking 180k of that, leaving you with 420k/month. So you getting 500k and Apple getting nothing sounds like a pretty good deal.
If those people really exist in large quantities (and I can believe they do!), the developer is losing business by not providing Apply Pay as an option. But that'd just lead every single customer to use Apple Pay, which is not what the developer wants. So you need to somehow give the people an incentive to choose your version, unless they really think that going through Apple is giving them a lot of value. Differential pricing seems like the most obvious way of doing that.
> Maaaaybe competition would force you to drop prices but a lot of consumer software isn't fungible and doesn't really compete on price.
That seems implausible. If you think that software prices don't matter at all, such that lowering prices does not increases sale, it'd follow that raising prices doesn't lower sales either. In that case, why hasn't the developer already raised prices?