Price Trolls

$4.99. This is the price you’ll have to pay for Pixelmator, a desktop-class photo editor. I don’t know if the ridiculously low price was set at Apple’s request (a $19.99 price tag at the end of a Keynote demo would have much less impact) but if this trend continues it may hurt the App Store on the long run.

Of course, the makers of Pixelmator can afford such a low price since they’ll get a ton of promotion and the download volume will make up for it but this is not the case for most developers.

It sends the message to consumers that they shouldn’t pay much for quality software and that developers asking for a fair price are greedy. Eventually, it will be no longer profitable to develop for the platform and we’ll start seeing less quality apps on the App Store.