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AT&T's app developer billing scheme: Will app makers buy in?

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AT&T's app developer billing scheme: Will app makers buy in?

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paulzolo

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AT&T's app developer billing scheme: Will app makers buy in?


	Quote: AT&T's trial balloon of charging app developers for bandwidth their users consume might not stay in the air very long. John Donovan, AT&T's senior executive vice president for technology and network operations, told the Wall Street Journal this week that the carrier was considering developing "a feature" that would be "the equivalent of 800 numbers that would say, if you take this app, this app will come without any network usage" from the end user's perspective. Instead, the company whose app was being used would be the one to foot the bill for the bandwidth consumed. Or put another way: People using the app wouldn't incur any data usage on their monthly service plans but app developers would have to pay a price as condition of users' unlimited data use through the app.

http://www.macworld.com/article/165647/ ... c.rss_main

This seems like an odd idea got me, but then Americans charge you for receiving calls.

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Fri Mar 02, 2012 9:14 am

l3v1ck

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Re: AT&T's app developer billing scheme: Will app makers buy in?


	paulzolo wrote: ... but then Americans charge you for receiving calls.

Yeah, I found that really annoying when I was there. I would complain about the same for texts too, but they were only 5c (2.5p at the time) including texts to the UK. I could text my wife from the USA for about a third of the price it would cost me to text her from across the street in the UK.

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Fri Mar 02, 2012 9:48 am

big_D

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Re: AT&T's app developer billing scheme: Will app makers buy in?

This is exactly what BT tried with the BBC over their iPlayer back in 2010(?).

Prioritised traffic and paid for by the app provider, on top of their normal data costs. I don't think it will find much use, the margins are too tight for most startups, they couldn't afford to do it for long or they would have to charge the users a subscription to cover the data costs - either way, the user doesn't benefit or ends up losing out.

I'll stick with my flat rate data plan, thanks all the same. I rarely use more than a few hundred MBs in a month and I get 5GB before it gets throttled on my T-Mobile plan.

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Fri Mar 02, 2012 9:56 am

l3v1ck

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Re: AT&T's app developer billing scheme: Will app makers buy in?

I think the idea is doomed to failure myself. People on contracts will just use their data allowance for aps. Developers would eventually need to charge a subscription, but who would pay that when you can get the normal app for free using your contract data allowance?
One possible person may be a pay as you go customer, but then if they are paying app subscriptions, why not just use that money to pay for a data allowance that can be used for anything instead?
So the app developers don't want it as it'll cost the money, most customers won't want it, so it's doomed.

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Fri Mar 02, 2012 3:32 pm

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