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Evans: App Store subscriptions unlock sustainable economics for productivity software

Benedict Evans · a16z Podcast | Apple and the Widgetification of Everything · Jan 2, 2019 · at 18:14

Benedict Evans, partner at Andreessen Horowitz, discusses Apple's App Store pricing changes announced around WWDC 2016 and their impact on mobile software monetization.

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“The introduction of new subscription pricing options last week, potentially changes the economics for a developer, because now if you're going to make a really interesting productivity app, instead of having to charge 50 dollars for it, or give it away for free, and those are basically your only options, or charge five dollars for it and hope That you get a million people using it. Now you can make it a dollar a month or five dollars a month, and you can make it five dollars a month and 15 dollars a month for different functionality. And so you have much more scope for people to invest in creating kind of more sophisticated, more powerful applications, because you have this kind of scope for recurring revenue within that.”

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