Do Apple do this without informing developers? And are developers able to set different price tiers for an app in different territories?
I’m sure the situation could be improved to give developers a bit more control over the sale of their own products, though Sweeney is obviously angling more for headlines than any actual positive change.
For your second ....... I imagine if a developer only sell their app (or a special version of one) in certain countries, then it's yes. They can price it as they wish. But if they sell the same app in more than one country, then the apps will cost the same in all those countries, with regards to currency exchange rates.
If the same app cost significantly less in the US, than it does in the UK (or EU), what prevent a person (outside the US) from buying the same app in the US by using a VPN?
Significant inconvenience. The exact same problem exists for all sorts of digital goods and hasn’t proven a major problem for anyone else.
I'm not a developer but it would seem that being able to develop one app in the US app store that works across many countries and have Apple or Google manage the price for all the countries that the developer chooses to sell their apps in, (to take into account the currency exchange rate), would be a major convenience. If a developer wants to price their app different in another country, like say the UK, then they need to develop a version for that country and they can price that differently than their US version of the app. Or even create an .."EU"... version that's only available for sale in EU countries.
Hell, I think all the developer would have to do in Xcode, is to add something like ... "UK" ....to the title of their app and create another app for the app store, that they can restricted for sale only in the UK. Now the developer have two of the same app in the app store, each with a different title, that they can manage separately. Doesn't seem to be a major inconvenience, unless they want to separately manage all the apps they sell in like a dozen or more countries. But even those versions would be subject to Apple pricing changes due to the changes in the currency exchange rates. So the developers still have to keep up with that.
Not sure what you're arguing with there, I don't massively disagree with any of it, though maintaining multiple country specific apps would likely be much more of a ballache that you're estimating.
The inconvenience I was talking about was your question about what would stop users from installing a VPN so they can get cheaper apps from abroad, which I think roughly zero people would do.
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The inconvenience I was talking about was your question about what would stop users from installing a VPN so they can get cheaper apps from abroad, which I think roughly zero people would do.