It’s become official, Apple just released FaceTime for Mac in the Mac App Store today. Now Mac OS X users can chat with other Apple customers on their iPhone 4 and iPod Touch. With the video-chat feature entering into an already growing ecology of apps that do the same thing, some media writers are scratching their heads as to why Apple is charging for it.

Not because a dollar isn’t a lot of money to spend on an app; on the contrary, most app users will gladly put down the cost of a morning latte for a program that they can continue to use ad infinitam for the lifetime of their device. It’s that the competition for the same niche is free.

Sarah Perez of Read Write Web places the question directly in the minds of the readers,

It’s also surprising to see the $0.99 fee considering that Apple’s main competition, Skype, began giving away free video chat with its iPhone application back in December 2010. And Skype’s version works over both Wi-Fi and 3G connections, while FaceTime on mobile is a Wi-Fi only application.

Other startups in the video chat space are growing quickly too. Tango, for example, does iPhone and Android video chat sessions with desktop support in the works, and up-and-comer ooVoo does video chat with up to 6 participants on Mac, PC, Android and soon, iOS devices. How does Apple expect to compete with cross-platform competitors whose apps are free?

Point-in-fact the app itself for iPhone and iPod Touch happens to be free; but if people want to use their Mac to chat with mobile users they have to pay. Also, as the article mentions, Skype video—which is also available on the iPhone and can do mobile-to-PC—happens to be free.

In the grant scheme of things this seems to be in line with a sort of “value added” concept. Apple FaceTime, unlike its competitors happens to be native to the Apple platform, it can take advantage of the UI in a way that a lot of 3^rd party apps cannot and Apple will probably integrate it with things like iTunes—I imagine taking photos from the FaceTime chat session or even jamming to music together (although who knows how the music industry might react to that.)

Perhaps Apple is going to try to run entirely on brand recognition and leverage the “well, we make the iPhone and the Mac so we should do it better anyway.” In a fundamental sense, Apple has dominated the market on their superior ability to provide UIs that people enjoy and the so-called “cult of Mac” is pretty loyal. People who already use FaceTime for mobile-to-mobile voice chat will most likely not be interested in buying into something like Skype just to do mobile-to-PC when the convenience cost is only $0.99.

After all, FaceTime was Apple’s bid to “change the way we communicate forever.”