App prices rise on UK Apple Store

When the Apple store went down yesterday for several hours for ‘maintenance’ many of us thought that this was the time that OS X Lion would be added to the store and when the expected new MacBook Air would go on sale. However, looks like we were wrong as a look through the app store changes reveals no new hardware and Lion is nowhere to be seen.

Instead Apple have been re-jigging and re-pricing all of their apps. It has long been the case that apps on the US store, taking exchange rates in to consideration, were cheaper than here in the UK. But following this down time apple have actually increased the price of all the apps within the store so an app that cost just 59p yesterday will set you back 69p today. As the cost of the app rises so too does the percentage increase, the price increase goes as high as 20 percent in some tiers.

You can see a breakdown of the price increases below. Bizarely though, we’ve just heard that the prices of apps on the Australian store have gone down by a similar margin!

Getting back to OS X Lion though, we’re still expecting to see this arrive on the App Store within a matter of days rather than weeks and we’re pretty sure that there’s a hardware refresh for the MacBook Air and Mac Mini just around the corner.

App store price rises:

• 59p is now 69p (14 per cent)
• £1.19 now £1.49 (20 per cent)
• £1.79 now £1.99 (10 per cent)
• £2.39 now £2.49 (4 per cent)
• £2.99 still £2.99 (-)
• £3.49 now £3.99 (13 per cent)
• £3.99 now £4.99 (20 per cent)
• £4.99 now £5.49 (9 per cent)
• £5.49 now £5.99 (8 per cent)
• £5.99 now £6.99 (14 per cent)
• £6.99 now £7.99 (13 per cent)
• £7.49 now £8.99 (17 per cent)
• £8.99 now £10.49 (14 per cent)
• £9.49 now £10.99 (14 per cent)

Posted by: Matt