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Apple Eases Rules For Subscription Apps
pjfontillas writes "Apple has quietly reversed their decision that required publishers who sell content and subscriptions in their iPhone and iPad apps to go through iTunes, with Apple taking a 30% cut. It's not so quiet in the workplace, however, as this news has a pretty big influence on developer workloads. Here at The New York Times our developers breathed a sigh of relief once we realized we don't have try and work around that requirement like The Financial Times did. Apple seems to have been doing much better with their community (consumers and developers alike) recently."
Reader imamac notes that Apple has also filed a motion to intervene in the Lodsys patent suit against several iOS app developers that we've been following.
They're finally realizing that their restrictive practices are a little too restrictive?
Crazy talk, I know...
Financial Times announced a web application and killed their app store subscription app.
How exactly does a sentence which starts with "here at The New York Times" ends up having two grammatical mistakes in it?
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Google and Microsoft, where are you?
Having a strong competitor will do the most amazing things :)
I'm so glad that Google didn't let Apple achieve the >75% marketshare that they did with the iPods. Can you imagine the iPhone being the only credible smartphone in the market?
I'm a cynic. I think they decided it would be more profitable in the long run. Android is growing like a weed on phones, and at least has some nifty tablets, even if those sales stink. Windows Phone is getting all the bells and whistles in the fall (even though their sales numbers stink too), and next year Windows 8 will attempt to take on iPad and OS X at the same time with a unified platform.
Apple has made tons of money already from their mandated royalties, and I think they are just feeling worried and trying to assuage old grudges of their partners in preparation for the next waves of real competition.
Or you can get a license from Lodsys for 0.0575% of revenue and skip the lawsuit.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Note that the devil is in the details.
While Apple will
They're still bound to some rules:
In other words.. they can offer the subscription elsewhere, but they're not allowed to make it easy for users to pick up said subscription.
It's still an improvement (for publishers, for users I'm sure the proposed earlier method was already ideal) as publishers can now at least offset the Apple take through price differentiation - but it still has its idiosyncrasies.
Yeah, look at the exorbitant fees they are charging for iCloud ($0) and for Lion ($29). It's just ridiculous.
I think you forgot to read the summary.
In any company, there's always somebody who has the "Sanity Token" and is
therefore actually *thinking* about the consequences. Apparently a party or parties
unknown in corporate finally realized that sodomizing your developer community
is a massively suboptimal long-term strategy.
Here is hoping that Apple doesn't screw with its browsers to make HTML5 web apps suck.
Apple had explicitly suggested that developers who don't like Apple's terms for apps, so I doubt if this was a major factor. But it was always clear that the rules would have to be modified, because as previously formatted, they would have required firms like Amazon, which already had an efficient system for selling content to pay a hefty price for a service that they didn't really need, and a Web Kindle app would not be and adequate substitute for the Kindle app. Forcing the Kindle app off of iOS would have caused a major backlash from consumers who bought Apple products in the expectation that they would be able tom access their substantial Kindle libraries.
No, as the HTML 5 proponents say, HTML 5 can do everything native apps can do. Now watch me remake Crysis 2 using the untapped powers of Canvas, SVG and Javascript...
....And then you can get a letter from Patent Ventures for 0.05% of your revenue to use UI buttons to actuate numerical addition in your app. And then a letter from Intellectual Troll Partners for $30 flat in order to use shake gestures to delete app objects. And then Fraunhofer can ask for 1% because you're encoding an MP3 with Apple's implementation of their codec (sure Apple licensed it, but now that they see you'll roll over, maybe they think that license doesn't apply to phones all of the sudden, and maybe they'd lose but you'd have to go to court over that)...
The precedent would basically make any kind of 3rd party development on any application platform impossible.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Right. Because the one thing we all can agree on about Apple is that it's an unorganized mess without a strong controlling central authority.
No comment.
Let me know when an HTML5 web app running in Safari for iOS can prompt the user to turn on the microphone and camera. Has that feature been added yet?
They're only charging $0 if your media is through iTunes. Any other media you may want to store on the cloud will require a $24.99 a year subscription.
Apple changed its policies back because of money too. They realized that this move would damage their reputation and drive developers away from iOS.
Apple's gotten too big. It's got a major case of left-hand not knowing what right-hand is doing. It's almost a culture.
Gotten too big? By what arbitrary standard could that be decided? Because you don't like Apple?
Please give even a single instance of "left-hand not knowing what right-hand is doing" where Apple is concerned. That's about as far from reality as you can get in Apple's case. Not only is their integration working remarkably well for them, but their focus is almost terrifying in it's scope. Everything Apple does informs everything else, from the design of their hardware, software, and retail stores, to the thrust of their advertising and their carefully managed public image. That is their culture, which is diametrically opposed to your assertion. You're really describing Microsoft, with their multiple competing fiefdoms.
When Apple first announced their guidelines for subscriptions and the publishers protested in outrage, I predicted in a discussion that Apple would change them before they went into effect. I argued at the time that it seemed to me that Apple were merely floating a trial balloon to see how far they could push, and were probably well prepared in advance to exercise some flexibility. This also works for them, because they can then give the public impression that they're prepared to be reasonable, when in fact they had probably planned internally for less stringent terms. As I said, Apple manages their public image with extreme care, and I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised that they pushed their original terms knowing full well that they had no intention of implementing them. In fact I would argue that they would have been surprised if they had been widely accepted.
I read the actual Financial Times article about this and they stated the cost savings by going the web app route was 5x what they figured originally. The explanation is that the web app is platform independant, meaning they have only one code base to maintain instead of apps for each and every app store
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
Yes, because Win95>98 and 2000 > XP > Vista > 7 were all "updates" right? Not even "service patches".
What reality do you live in?
Yeah, that's great.... if you charge a gazillion dollars for the hardware. Apart from the Mac Pro, which is overpriced, the hardware is pretty comparable with similar hardware on the "pc" side.
If you want bottom-of-the-barrel razor-thin-profit-margin junk though, like the lowest end Dell or other cheap machine, then such is life. If you want a decent machine (on either side of the OS spectrum), the prices are comparable - especially recently with increases in the GPU offerings.
Whoooosh.
-- Linux user #369862
They used to charge for mobile me, it didn't work well, but people paid for it anyways. icloud does the same stuff and more.
They obviously could have charged for icloud if they wanted to, but they didn't. Keep in mind, I'm arguing against, "Apple seems to be big on money grabbing from everybody for everything lately." I'd say that lately, they are not into that.
Lion is "just an update"? airdrop, autosave, versions, resume, customizable gestures are all new.
But isn't airdrop really stupid? Yes, you could do this on any unix box, but it would probably take you about 5 minutes to setup and get working correctly. Even then, other users would have to disconnect from the wifi they were using to connect to your wifi and dl the file and then reconnect. What a pain. Why do that? But here it just works, you stay connected to your wifi and you can use my wifi ftp like service at the same time. Don't hate it because it is beautiful.
5 GB free, plus all purchased items. It also includes all the capabilities of mobile me which was $99/year.
What does windows have to do with what I said? Stay focused. "Cheetah", "Puma", "Jaguar", "Panther", "Tiger", "Leopard", "Snow Leopard" & "Lion" are all the same operating system, and you have to pay for every friggin update. I am trying to say that even $30 is too expensive, when it is just an tiny update. It even looks the same as it used to. Service patches and updates are free from Microsoft, if you want to drag them into it. I never even mentioned them, and I'm pretty sure the jumps in Microsoft's OS's evolve in a wide berth, since the jump from 95 & 98 to 2000 involved going back to the NT architecture, which was changed dramatically for XP and Vista.
The claim was that apple was charging "everybody for everything." In point of fact, icloud is a thing, and when I use it, I will not be charged. The claim is wrong. QED.
So windows before 2000 was not just bug fixes, and afterwords is not just new clothes on the same OS? You could have fooled me.
Yeah between those versions Apple added : iChat, Safari, FileVault, Exposé, Fast User Switching, Spotlight, Dashboard, Quicktime 7, Quicktime X, Automator, VoiceOver, Core Image, Core Video, Rosetta, Time Machine, Spaces, BootCamp, Grand Central, LauchPad, Mission Control, Quartz Composer, etc., etc. But you know, other than that you're right it's the same system.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
The only quiet nature of it is that the Press calls it that due to Apple not broadcasting it's policies as front page news. The Developers all know about it and it didn't sneak up on us.
I am pretty shocked at this. Apple seems to be big on money grabbing from everybody for everything lately.
Apple doesn't primarily run their Music and App stores as a profit center. They exist to add value to their main products, which are hardware.
Apple makes more profit overall about every four months than they have made in total revenue from their 30% cuts in all iTunes stores combined since they first opened. And that's before taking into considerations the costs of running, maintaining, improving, etc., their stores, as well as covering the credit card fees, and licensing patents like Amazon's One-Click patent, and Lodsys's patent (which they are now defending their developers against, for no charge).
This rule change isn't about Apple giving up money, or reversing some sort of "money grabbing" trend, it's about finding a way to keep their product appealing to their customers (the end user) while still encouraging developers to stay aboard. The old rules didn't do the job as well.
Why would they do that? They want people to use web apps. Apple is at the forefront of HTML5.
Gee. It's almost like some over-controlling jerk in upper management must be out sick, or something.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Yes, they saved money by only making one app instead of two. They also are leaving money on the table by not giving their consumers what they want.
Because they have to pay the labels and studios.
More like Apple == Apple. Throughout their history, they've been hell-bent on proprietary hardware and proprietary software to run on it.
opensource.apple.com
Apple has even initiated their own open source projects. And their hardware is based on open standards and industry standards, including standards that Apple themselves have made available to third parties.
You are right, though, that "Apple == Apple", but they are neither completely open, or completely closed. They are user-centric, with a focus on "normal" people. That's the one, main constant at Apple, and also why they are so phenomenally successful. It's also why this "Apple is super-proprietary" or evil or money grubbing, or whatever arguments are so misguided.
At least with Microsoft and the PC, you generally had a little bit of flexibility with the hardware (commodity parts aplenty, at least a few different disk operating systems, Xenix, etc and Linux for the last 20 years), but it's clear that the Apple dream is complete control of an integrated hardware/software stack.
The same Microsoft that would hose your bootloader if you installed Windows after installing Linux? And the same Apple that sells Macs with the express capability of running Windows? And which have been able to run Linux for well over a decade?
It's the freaking dark ages of computing all over again.
The "dark ages" where more people are able to do more things with their computers (especially Apple computers and devices) than ever before? Oh my, what an awful age we live in!
I'll just link to the post that already replied to you: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2228992&cid=36405510
"What Windows has to do with it" is something called a "direct comparison".
You are saying "I am trying to say that even $30 is too expensive, when it is just an tiny update. It even looks the same as it used to." - when the "look" of Win 95 to Win 98 didn't change, for example. Not that changing the look entirely needs to happen for an OS to be considered a new version (you're seriously going with that as a legitimate reason? The 2008 and 2009 Ford Fiesta use the same body shell. This means the 2009 one should be free, right?)
While the look of OS X has remained broadly similar across the versions (ie, they have found a UI that works and don;t see the need to mess with it too much) does not mean that subsequent releases of the OS are merely "software updates". The amount of work and features that have gone into it between 10.1 and 10.6 (and now 7) just don;t bear that out.
Simply the fact that it looks the same is not a reason to say "lolz it's just a point release and should be free!"
To say those were service patches shows your ignorance and bias. Sell your crazy someplace else!
What does windows have to do with what I said? Stay focused. "Cheetah", "Puma", "Jaguar", "Panther", "Tiger", "Leopard", "Snow Leopard" & "Lion" are all the same operating system, and you have to pay for every friggin update. I am trying to say that even $30 is too expensive, when it is just an tiny update. It even looks the same as it used to. Service patches and updates are free from Microsoft, if you want to drag them into it. I never even mentioned them, and I'm pretty sure the jumps in Microsoft's OS's evolve in a wide berth, since the jump from 95 & 98 to 2000 involved going back to the NT architecture, which was changed dramatically for XP and Vista.
There are many, many, many changes under the hood in your progression of OS X versions.
Each year at WWDC, Jobs gets up and talks about al the new features, APIs, and other changes. And yet, because they have kept a relatively consistent look-and-feel, you discount it all as "Service Patches".
I have something to tell you: This has nothing to do with "Service Patches". Apple pushes those out at a fairly consistent rate, and for free. Always has, always will. Instead, each of these OS updates actually introduce NEW functionality, and lots of it.
In fact, the one time that wasn't the case, Leopard to Snow Leopard, Apple only charged $29 for a boxed retail copy of the OS. In that case, Jobs got up on stage and said, "This is a maintenance release. There aren't a lot of new features. We're just tightening up some stuff, and getting rid of some legacy cruft (like PPC code). Therefore, we're only gonna charge $29 instead of $129."
The only reason why they are doing that with Lion is that they are not suffering the costs of actually providing a physical media, and want people to move forward to a 64-bit-clean OS (which is why CoreDuo is not supported).
But for you to sit there and type that a decade's worth of thousands upon thousands of new APIs are nothing more than "Service Patches", is patently ridiculous.
They're only charging $0 if your media is through iTunes. Any other media you may want to store on the cloud will require a $24.99 a year subscription.
Ooooo! $25 a fucking YEAR! How moneygrubbing!
Gimme a break.