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Comment by lhnz | Hacker News Reader

Great but as many have pointed out the biggest problem with the App Store is that IAP has made pricing completely opaque.

The whole experience is completely untrustworthy as an app which requires an average spend of £20+ to use properly is considered more "Free" than an app which costs £2.99.

It's made a complete mockery of prices.

Fixed prices are popular for a reason and I hope Apple learns this and starts properly surfacing information as well as categorising based on the reality of an App's "price."

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It would be interesting if the app store displayed the median total expenditure for any application that includes IAP. How would buying behavior be affected when suddenly that "free" game includes a note like "$59 median total spent"?

[Edit: clarity]

I think the median for "free" apps with IAPs would almost always be 0. My guess is that the vast majority of people don't pay anything with a small minority making up the bulk of the app's profits.

What you really need is a value that represents that amount you need to pay to actually enjoy the app which would be a lot harder to quantify.

That's a good point. So, perhaps two numbers: percentage who pay, then median for those who do.

That's absolutely what our stats say.A tiny portion of players will spend a crazy amount of money in IAP,while the great majority will never pay anything.The "free" app is kinda subsidized. Doesnt excuse dirty IAP tricks,you can choose the IAP model and still let most users have a great experience even without paying.

If you showed the average, but only the average people who have paid something, do you think that would give reasonable numbers?

Why not just show a graph of the whole distribution, sorted by amount spent? It's 2014; single-number summaries can sometimes be useful, but it's not required to use them now we have computers and can work with the full data set.

Or instead of a single number representing the average, show a distribution of the mean total spent by each centile of users.

You'll likely see a long flat line at 0 for the first 95% and then a steep curve up for the last 5%.

If an app has high-quality in-app purchases, you will likely see that the curve slopes up slower.

That's the most valid perspective IMO, but it's going to be useless to the audience, when they can't even understand what a "median" is, much less a centile.

The "free" one can at least be tried at no cost. I'm quite annoyed with the iOS App Store keeping my money for several apps that are entirely non-functional.

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