Posted Wednesday on Apple’s developer News and Updates page: “Upcoming tax and price changes for apps and in-app purchases“…
When taxes or foreign exchange rates change, we sometimes need to update prices on the App Store in certain regions and/or adjust your proceeds.
In the next few days, prices of apps and in-app purchases (excluding auto-renewable subscriptions) on the App Store will increase in the following regions. Your proceeds will be adjusted accordingly and will be calculated based on the tax-exclusive price.
-
- Bahrain: Increase of value-added tax from 5% to 10%
- Ukraine: New value-added tax of 20%
- Zimbabwe: New digital services tax of 5%
Prices on the App Store in the following regions will not change, but your proceeds will be adjusted to reflect the following tax changes:
-
- The Bahamas: Decrease of value-added tax from 12% to 10%
- Oman: New value-added tax of 5%
- Tajikistan: Decrease of value-added tax from 18% to 15%
In addition, your proceeds will be adjusted accordingly to reflect tax changes for the following content types, if you’ve selected the appropriate tax category in App Store Connect and the changes impact your proceeds:
-
- Austria: Value-added tax rate reversion to 10% after temporary decrease to 5% for qualifying e-books and audiobooks
- Latvia: Value-added tax rate decrease from 21% to 5% for qualifying e-books and e-publications
- Romania: Value-added tax rate decrease from 19% to 5% for qualifying e-books, audiobooks, and e-publications
Once these changes go into effect, the Pricing and Availability section of My Apps will be updated. You can change the price of your apps and in-app purchases (including auto-renewable subscriptions) at any time in App Store Connect. If you offer subscriptions, you can choose to preserve prices for existing subscribers.
My take: Apple could afford to absorb the costs, but prefers to pass them along. The company didn’t nearly reach $3 trillion by throwing coins in a fountain.
There are places where it makes sense for Apple to ‘eat costs’, not this one.
HEB invests in the store, the upkeep, the personnel, the paperwork…etc.
Then they take a cut of whatever is sold inside their store. Same as Nordstrom, Dick’s, WalMart, etc.
What am I missing?
Much of the legislative and regulatory assault on “big tech” is based on that (obscene profits) principle. The “Willy Horton” principle (‘that’s where the money is’) is also a consideration. Now there are definitely aspects of technology (big and small) that need regulation (US -needs- an equivalent of EU’s GDPR!), but that should be based on policy, and not on ‘capturing excess profits to serve the needs of the people’.