The cost of goods on a cup of Starbucks coffee is substantial (servers, beans, equipment, rent, utilities, cup, creamer)
The cost of goods on your $1 app is close to, and perceived to be, zero.
The cost of goods on your $1 app is close to, and perceived to be, zero.
Cost of goods refers to the production cost of an individual item. COG for app store is zero. You don't even pay for hosting your app on the app store.
Software developers are R&D, not cost of goods.
There is R&D associated with Starbucks coffee as well (researching beans, refining the blends, etc), but nobody really factors that into its perceived value.
- If you include equipment, rent, and utilities in your cost calculations, then you have to include software developers and servers that are powering the app. I am not talking about apps that you build, publish and forget. Most apps have backend and engineers maintaining and supporting them.
- You ignored my point about the customer acquisition cost which is likely to be the biggest cost for most apps.
The duplication of an app for each install is technically very low cost (although you could say that the app store taking 30% is a cost there), that doesn't mean there weren't large up front costs and ongoing ones as well.
What about maintenance, support, infrastructure like servers/services/bandwidth. For anything of a decent size you probably have to do these things, which means you probably need staff, which means you probably need an office, benefits, insurance, all the usual business costs. That's not even bringing up the constant updates, new features, and supporting the ever changing platform or environment it runs on, which is all completely expected by users.
Apps are as much of a regular business as anything else, not some magic special case.