App Store's low prices, lack of free trials and refunds, and other limitations make small developers reluctant to create professional-grade apps for iPad Pro
Lauren Goode / The Verge :
Context & Ripple Effects
Days after the iPad Pro launched as Apple's productivity play, Lauren Goode reports that the App Store itself is the bottleneck: upfront prices are low, and there are no free trials or refunds, so small developers can't charge what pro-grade software costs to make. The complaint landed alongside a sibling report that Apple appeared equally to have forgotten the Mac App Store, which lacked even TestFlight — the same store-as-afterthought pattern across two platforms at once.
What came next validates the critique: Apple spent 2017 urging dozens of developers to abandon cheap upfront pricing for subscriptions (its own SaaS pivot advice) rather than fixing trial-and-refund mechanics directly, and the grievance resurfaced years later as one reason developer enthusiasm for Vision Pro fell short of Apple's hopes, per Bloomberg's reporting on anger at App Store policies.
First-order effects
- Small developers rationally withhold professional-grade apps from iPad Pro right now, because the storefront gives them no way to price, trial, or refund high-cost software — leaving the hardware's productivity pitch under-served by its catalog.
Second-order effects
- Apple responds by steering developers toward subscriptions instead of overhauling the store's pricing primitives, while newer platforms like Vision Pro inherit the same policy anger — Bloomberg tied weak developer buy-in partly to these unresolved grievances, even though pricier apps may fare better there.
Third-order effects
- Because iPadOS doesn't meet DMA thresholds, it won't get third-party app stores or browser engines, so the structural fix competitors might offer — an alternative storefront with better pro-software terms — can't reach the iPad; Apple's own pricing-tool evolution remains the only lever, and the recurring pattern suggests regulatory pressure will keep circling back to store economics.
The trend: Apple's storefront economics act as a recurring brake on professional software across each new hardware platform, from the 2015 iPad Pro through Vision Pro, with regulation now entering where Apple's voluntary fixes lagged.