Back in the App Business!

I decided to get back to writing apps for phones.  I did have a welcome change.  When searching to see how much it cost for various markets I noticed one company had an article online that said what I’ve been saying for quite some time.  If Windows wanted to have more of a share of apps, they needed to reduce their fees!  It’s really stupid that companies that host apps for cell phones charge so much just to get your app listed on their web page!  It’s not that developers don’t want to develop for any specific phone, and it’s not that the phones don’t support their apps.  Any developer can use phonegap to generate an app that works on every platform from the same piece of code.  What stops them from distributing on each market is the cost!  Apple charges $99 to get your app out to iphone users, Windows normally charges $99, but now for a limited time they reduced the price to $19!  Android charges $25, and Amazon is free for the time being.  Next time you see an advertisement for Candy Crush Saga on TV, think about this.  The company has Candy Crush Saga available for every platform and has TV ads available.  That’s a hefty cost to distribute an app for “FREE”!  How do they do it?  They sell the app for free and get you to pay to go up to next levels.  Now the markets aren’t accepting your payments for you out of the kindness of their hearts either!  Each time you make a sale, they gladly keep a percentage of the cost for handling the transaction.  Now consider Amazon boast being able to run apps on their Kindles, and those apps on Kindle comes from the Amazon Market.  They advertise they give away 1 free app a day, and if a developer chooses, then he can participate in that and one of his apps may be chosen to be given away.  It can be a free app, or a paid app.  If a paid app, the developer will likely loose a lot of money in sales because of the give-away.  Now these apps are helping to sell the kindles.  Apps on Apple’s iTunes help to sell iPhones.  Google Play Store apps help to sell Android phones from all different companies.  Lack of apps on Windows phones actually hurts the sale of Windows phones.  With that in mind, Market companies should drop the startup fees for selling apps and just go for a percentage of the sales.