App developers make money from apps by either selling it for a one time fee upfront, through ads in the app, or in-game purchases. However it looks like Apple is introducing a new way for developers to make money, and that is through subscriptions, as revealed by Apple’s VP of Marketing Phil Schiller during an interview with The Verge.
Subscription within apps aren’t new and we’ve seen that offered through the likes of magazine apps and also service based apps, like Tinder, Netflix, and so on. However Apple is now opening up subscription to all apps, meaning that any app can be a subscription-based app. To that end, Apple is also going to increase the profit sharing.
It used to be 30/70 where 30% would go to Apple, but according to Schiller, if developers can keep users interested and subscribed to the app for more than a year, the revenue sharing will become 15/85, where Apple will now take less than they did before. We’re not sure what kind of apps might take advantage of this.
As it stands purchasing video games for the PC and console tend to be a one off purchase and the only time you would pay for a subscription would be for MMORPGs. It will be interesting to see how users react to this, and more importantly what kind of apps would be adopting this new model, but what do you guys think?