By Sayoko Knight Teitelbaum

This past week, Apple announced a price increase to the various pricing tiers in the app store. As you can only imagine, consumers in affected countries are not happy about this change. Think about this for a second:  You are an iTunes customer registered in the UK, and were hit with over a 15% increase on apps. Would you, as a consumer, understand the various pricing tiers and how Apple assigns marketing prices based on relative exchange rates? My guess is no.

My fellow countrymen in the United States are not affected by this price increase. That’s because Apple chose to keep the US$0.99 price as the foundation for how all other countries were affected. On the flip side, the Japanese, Australians and Swiss are all happy about this. That’s because their currencies have flourished against the dollar and their local market pricing has come down.

One might think that £0.10 is not a big deal. One also might think that the British should be used it to it. They certainly pay more for Apple hardware. They pay higher income tax and higher sales tax. So what’s another 15% on apps, right? Well, I think they are wrong. It will be interesting to see how the UK consumer responds. And how the Android marketshare is affected.