Me, reblogging Richard back in February:
Action at a Distance: On Apple’s subscription payments
Apple finally launched the long-rumoured iOS subscription pricing for content producers. The important bits are:
- “Apple today announced a new subscription service available to all publishers of content-based apps on the App Store, including magazines, newspapers, video, music, etc.”
- “Apple…
Looks like I was right, though I certainly didn’t expect them to completely drop the in-app purchasing requirement. Seems they’re solving the problem I mentioned above by specifying in the guidelines what types of content (media, basically) can be sold outside the app.
I’m sure a lot of different factors went into this decision. I have to think the Kindle app was a big part of it, though. From a technical standpoint there simply wasn’t any way for Amazon to use IAP. But if Apple kicked them out, they’d be kicking out one of the most popular apps on the platform. That’s not something they’d want to do, especially when Amazon is rumored to be developing their own tablets. But if they gave Amazon a pass, it would cause ill-will with the rest of the developer community. So my guess is they looked at the potential income from subscriptions and decided it wasn’t worth the trouble it would cause to enforce it.