It's about a year since Apple last updated it's App Store app prices in Europe, raising the $0.99 base price in euro from 0,79€ to 0,89€. Now, it seems we're about to see a new price hike, achieving parity, with apps starting at 0,99€.
If you check out Worms 3 in the App Store, you'll see that the $0.99 price has been converted to 0,99€. This is quite strange, as many other $0.99 apps still show up with the regular 0,89€ euro price.
Another $0.99 app still showing up the regular euro price
I can't even tell if this is actually legal. Can Apple sell products that have the same dollar price at different euro exchange rate?
It's not really about the extra cents we europeans will be paying for the apps. I think that it is just a matter of justice and decency. At the current USD/EUR rate, 0,99€ represents $1.33 US dollars. That means Europeans are paying an extra 33% tax on apps, which I consider to be quite greedy.
We're already using to paying "euro-for-dollar" prices on hardware, but in that case we can say that's due to shipping costs, extra warranty prices, taxes, and so forth. But on digitally distributed apps? It just can't be explained, other than Apple wanting to pocket a few extra billion dollars per year.
How long do they expect to keep this before we start seeing app reselling businesses pop up? You'd pay for an app at an extra 10% charge, and someone in the US would send you a gift code for the app. Is that too far-fetched to consider?
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