They could do that, but then users in some countries would have to pay 0.693 of their local currency or whatever. Why should the US be the only country that gets friendly looking prices?

Or just let the dev specify if they want to round prices to some precision?

I'm an American. I routinely buy things in GBP, EUR, and JPY and the amounts convert to an arbitrary number in USD. So what? It is displayed to me as 9.99 EUR. I understand I'm not going to have a nice, pretty .99 at the end of my credit card transaction.

I would expect that the vast majority of human beings very rarely buy anything in a currency other than that of their own country.

Yes, but you don't know that in the App store: you're buying from your "local" store regardless of where the developer is.

The point is that price points already are friendly-looking in every country. Price points are adjusted in each country, they’re not a 1:1 match with $USD.

Otoh, there's value in prices holding still for at least a while. And 'pretty' prices are appealing in general. You obviously can't hold prices still forever, but daily prices is probably not paletable.

Price points smooth the exchange rate fluctuation (how often should the prices be updated? Every second? More often?) and selects for prices that have certain cultural"gravity" as well.

I think buyers are more accustomed to and comfortable with "round" or "standard" prices like x.99, x.88, x.95, x.00 etc rather than x.47 or x.31.

Exchange rate fluctuation I think could be handled perfectly fine without price points but the price point "gravities" is a really good reason to use the system. Not sure why it should limit developers to that system but it certainly makes the system attractive/useful for many.

> Not sure why it should limit developers to that system but it certainly makes the system attractive/useful for many.

Because most developers are presumably experts in programming* and whatever the domain of their app is* (game, drawing program, whatever) and not experts in the psychology of pricing (unless it's a pricing app I suppose!).

Now so what? They could allow you to pick a predetermined price or type whatever integer you want into it. But I assume they think consistency makes for a better buying experience, and poor pricing choices are a kind of externality that affects everyone.

I'm slightly dubious of this "externality" really being bad but in this case I'll give the horde of Apple marketing researchers the benefit of the doubt.

* This is HN so the obvious snark has not been inserted

The problem with appeal to authority on this is the same could have been said last week about why it wasn’t like this. It doesn’t make it any more reasonable it just explains it is the way it is.

They were exactly like this just with fewer price points.

Understood but my point was the list changed to add price points not that they had no list at all. Hard to argue the price points are the only ones that should be used because Apple is the best at marketing if Apple themselves are adding price points.

The other reasons for using the price point model are very convincing just not the appeal to Apple having a hoarse of marketing people.

It's also obvious that you don't want the price to fluctuate between 99 copper-pieces and 89 copper-pieces every day just because the USD/copper-piece rate is somewhere around where 95 copper-pieces is the converted price - you would want periodic manual adjustments to the prices for each price point, taking into account all kinds of marketing aspects, not some automatic immediate response to any change.

It seems like every few minutes would be fast enough, but whatever. It's just weird that, given how important app store purchases are for Apple, they wouldn't just spend any amount of money to make the best possible system: do the currency conversion, snap to those behavioral psychology price points, round to the prettiest unit... the works. Wouldn't everything be on the table for the thing that makes so much money?

Heck, maybe they did do that, and this 900 price point system is actually the right way to do it. Doesn't seem like it, but maybe!

Yes, that's precisely what the price point system is. I found it kinda weird myself, but upon reflection it makes sense.

But it is not just math. It is about what constitutes a cheap app for an East-European or to a Chinese person vs that of an American, and how that changes with time in relation to the currencies. I really don’t get this dismissive mindset, do you honestly believe that a trillion dollar company didn’t think of this one little trick that you figured out in a minute?

The fact that is seems stupid from the point of view of the creator is irrelevant. It's not about the creators, it's about the users. Apple simplifies incredibly complex systems into good user experiences.

It is stupid. The exchange rates are a rehearing here. It's likely just a marketing aspect, setting the last digits etc or wlensrluring they don't lose out on a half cent of commission somewhere.