

Apple has announced that it’s raising App Store prices in seven countries including Canada, Israel, Mexico, New Zealand, Russia, Singapore, and South Africa. The changes are being made due to foreign exchange rate fluctuations.
Developers were sent an email notifying them that the prices changes will take affect within 72 hours.
Here’s the details…
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Subscriptions will not be interrupted in Canada, New Zealand, Mexico, and Singapore. Shortly before their existing subscription renews, subscribers in these territories will receive an email from us to let them know about the price increase with the option to turn off their subscription. Subscribers in Russia and South Africa will need to resubscribe at the new price. Israel will not be impacted, as auto-renewable In-App Purchase subscriptions are not supported there.
Two new low-price tiers will be available for the Canadian and New Zealand App Store: Alternate Tier A and Alternate Tier B. We’ll automatically update the prices for existing apps and In-App Purchases that already use the Alternate Tier A and Alternate Tier B price tiers.
Proceeds for the Romanian App Store have increased to account for the VAT (Value Added Tax) decrease from 24% to 20% effective Jan 1, 2016. Retail iprices on the Romanian App Store have not changed.
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WhatsApp Messenger is dropping its $1/year subscription fee and will be completely free to use. The company, now owned by Facebook, made the announcement earlier today.
We’re happy to announce that WhatsApp will no longer charge subscription fees. For many years, we’ve asked some people to pay a fee for using WhatsApp after their first year. As we’ve grown, we’ve found that this approach hasn’t worked well. Many WhatsApp users don’t have a debit or credit card number and they worried they’d lose access to their friends and family after their first year. So over the next several weeks, we’ll remove fees from the different versions of our app and WhatsApp will no longer charge you for our service.

So how will the app earn money? WhatsApp says it’s not planning to introduce third-party ads.
Starting this year, we will test tools that allow you to use WhatsApp to communicate with businesses and organizations that you want to hear from. That could mean communicating with your bank about whether a recent transaction was fraudulent, or with an airline about a delayed flight. We all get these messages elsewhere today – through text messages and phone calls – so we want to test new tools to make this easier to do on WhatsApp, while still giving you an experience without third-party ads and spam.
With nearly a billion users, dropping the subscription fee is a major loss in revenue for Facebook; however, it’s unlikely that the company would make the move without having a good monetization plan in place.