Yesterday Apple officially announced a range of new products that had been widely-expected, including two new iPhones and a release date for iOS 7, the new mobile operating system for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch – September 18. Excitingly for us, iOS 7 will include something that children’s app developers have long been waiting for: a dedicated category for Kids’ Apps.
A Kids’ Apps section of the App Store will hopefully mean that our apps will be more straightforward to find (previously they’ve been split across book, game and education categories), that parents and teachers will have easy access to information about the suitability of an app for different age groups, and that the very best apps for children will be showcased and promoted. Apps that are featured in the Kids’ App section must also comply with certain standards to ensure that they don’t encourage children to buy in-app content without parental permission (something that we care a lot about, and which we’ve written about previously on this blog).
The announcement has made us think about the position of our apps within the entire App Store ecosystem – their appearance, their price, their content and their extras. At the moment, our apps aren’t as cheap as some other kids’ apps on the Store, which is something we’ve always felt comfortable justifying: we think they’re also better value than a lot of apps, with higher production values, richer content and greater interactivity – and unlike a number of other products, we don’t have any in-app purchasing or advertising in our apps. At £3.99, we think reading experiences like our award-winning fairytale apps – The Three Little Pigs, Cinderella, and Little Red Riding Hood – are an absolute bargain (and our other apps are even cheaper).
We’d really like to hear from you, though. Now that kids’ apps will appear in a separate place on the App Store, will you expect to pay less for them? Or would you expect them to be free? What do you think’s the right price for a children’s app? What’s the price point you buy apps at most often? And are you comfortable making in-app purchases for kids’ apps?
If you’ve any thoughts or suggestions about pricing, we’d love to hear from you – and to thank you for your time, at the end of the week we’ll pick five comments (either here on the blog, on Facebook or on Twitter) at random and give the authors a copy of our Little Red Riding Hood app.
And keep an eye on our blog next week – we’ll have some exciting announcements to make to coincide with the release of iOS 7 and the Kids’ App category.
