Do you live in the European Union? Canada? Norway? Russia? Bad news, friends. Your App Store prices are about to shoot up. But hey, if you live in Iceland, great news: your app prices are going down!
In a note sent to developers from Apple’s App Store team yesterday, Apple warned developers that prices were about to change in multiple territories.
Within the next 36 hours, prices on the App Store will increase for all territories in the European Union as well as in Canada and Norway, decrease in Iceland, and change in Russia. These changes are being made to account for adjustments in value-added tax (VAT) rates and foreign exchange rates.
We will simultaneously update the Pricing Matrix in Rights and Pricing in My Apps on iTunes Connect.
We will also update the iOS Paid Applications and Mac OS X Paid Applications agreements, which will be available in Agreements, Tax, and Banking.
If you have any questions, contact us.
Regards
The App Store team
As you can see, Apple’s not just making a money grab here: they are instead making adjustments to account for VAT and fluctuating foreign exchange rates. The most obvious example of the kind of fluctuations they are concerned with is Russia, where Apple was forced to temporarily stop selling products because of extreme changes in the ruble.
In other words, it’s one of the many periodic rebalancings that Apple does to keep App Store prices fair. Sounds good to us.
Source: iClarified
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
5 responses to “App Store prices are going up in Europe, Canada, and Russia”
“Apple is not making money grab”. Ofcourse, a company with highest amount of cash in history would never make money grab at any given opportunity. Typical “cuntofmac” reporting..!!
Pricing in Europe can’t exactly be considered as “fair” when talking about Apple ;-)
Doesn’t sound good for a Canadian :(
You mean you aren’t used to be shafted by pretty much any product or service originating in the states? I’ve frankly gotten to the point where I’m thankful if whatever it is I want is available at all. :/
Oh yes, it’s just a coincidence that these ‘adjustments’ are AFTER the holidays and initial push for new phones. Apple knew these charges were coming (Russia aside), you can be sure of that. I applaud COM here, they are masters of spin. Odd, that COM has privy to this information and an explanation, but NO IDEA on why the typical holiday freebies were not given by Apple.