[Interest] Indie Mobil Program terminated?

Pau Garcia i Quiles pgquiles at elpauer.org
Fri Jul 10 22:25:51 CEST 2015


Thiago,

You are right only if every app sold on an app store is developed with Qt
with a commercial $350/month license. At that price, many people will look
for other solutions. It's the usual "every pirated movie is a lost DVD
sale" argument, which we all know it's not true.

The main problem I see with the % cut for Qt Company is not monitoring
(after all, people buying from an app store will be connected to the
Internet, probably from many places, which will make it kind of easy to
monitor). The main problem is the % itself, which may look discouraging to
developers:

   - The app store cut is a whopping 30%
   - What would be Digia's cut? 10%? Too little. 20%? Looks better
   -

Now think about it: 30% + 20% means 50% of your sales gone.

Wow

Or not?

While it may dissuade developers, it still looks cost effective to me: if
your app is going to sell a lot, then you are better off buying a
full-fledged commercial licensing and paying 0% royalties.

If your app is going to sell little, you are better off developing with Qt
(easier) and taking that 20% hit.

Problem would be free* apps: 20% of 0 USD is still 0 USD. Is there a
technical solution to this? I don't know.


* Including in-house apps, but those may already be covered by the LGPL
(depending on how you interpret "uploading the app to the app store
[outside my organization] but white-listing only company devices".


I don't really like this royalties thing but if it works for Unity and
essentially every 3D engine, why can't it work for Qt? Maybe the app stores
even offer some kind of "third-party revenue sharing" scheme (if they
don't, they should -- Apple and Google, are you listening?)



On Fri, Jul 10, 2015 at 7:09 PM, Thiago Macieira <thiago.macieira at intel.com>
wrote:

> On Saturday 11 July 2015 03:03:16 John C. Turnbull wrote:
> > Yeah but I am adding royalties.
>
> Ignoring the fact that it's difficult to monitor this and would generate
> even
> more cost, at a 5% cut that would require your application to sell at least
> $300 a month to break even with the current structure.
>
> In the real world, because of this extra monitoring, the costs would be
> much
> higher. So unless on average each Indie licence produced at least $1000 a
> month of net sales through the app stores, it is a bad value proposition
> for
> The Qt Company. Probably more.
>
> --
> Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
>   Software Architect - Intel Open Source Technology Center
>
> _______________________________________________
> Interest mailing list
> Interest at qt-project.org
> http://lists.qt-project.org/mailman/listinfo/interest
>



-- 
Pau Garcia i Quiles
http://www.elpauer.org
(Due to my workload, I may need 10 days to answer)
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