
Why Amazon Isn’t Worried About Apple’s In-App Purchasing Rules - gaiusparx
http://chuckdude.com/?p=150
======
georgemcbay
It would be pretty fitting if the end result of Apple's new pricing rules were
that everyone refocused on mobile webapps, thereby reducing the value of iOS
drastically and allowing it to much more easily be supplanted by commodity
Android devices.

If everything you're consuming is through webkit, who cares if you're on
Android or iOS? Might as well use the one with better Javascript performance
anyway.

Apple will still be winning on games but Google is clearly trying to address
that with the recent pushes in NDK development and given Apple's track record
with game developers it seems like only a matter of time until they do
something to ruin that as well.

~~~
nika
I find it kinda amazing how rumor becomes mythology which eventually morphs
into accepted fact. Apple has good relationships with game developers. They
may not kowtow to egomaniacs, and it always seems a roll of the dice whether a
given iteration of hardware compromises results in a pan or a plug from
carmack.

I develop apps. This is how I make my living. It would take a complete
reversal of apple's attitudes and directions to get me to develop for android.
Apple treats me well, pays me on time, and has a viable market where the rules
are consistent and reasonable.

Apple treats game developers well. Apple embraced OpenGL way back in the day
so that developers could write to one API and deploy on multiple platforms
(even Linux, presumably) This isn't Java, of course, but then, Apple also
supported Java completely until it became obvious Java had lost in the
marketplace (or market segment.)

Apple provides great APIs and functionality to support games on iOS. Maybe
Google will catch up, but they're still working on allowing native
development.

But this subscription thing is a perfect example of the disconnect between
android lovers and reality. Apple has offered a new mechanism to make payments
to developers. Do you think developers are angry about this? You think we're
switching to android because Apple allows us to sell our software by
subscriptions? Why would we be angry? This gives us more flexibility, and
saves us the hassle of setting up paypal or whatever.... I've got thousands of
customers, and I can assure you, less than a fraction of a percent of them
visit my website.

As a developer for and a user of iOS this just furthers Apple's value to me.

I've considered porting apps to Android. I'm not inclined to because I'd
rather spend the time making new apps in a market I know is viable for my type
of apps.

To win me over, Android would need to: 1) Provide native development (in
progress) 2) provide a level of APIs and frameworks of comperable quality to
Cocoa touch 3) provide a hardware reference platform and require android
licensees to build to it (apparently impossible) 4) develop enough of a market
of that common reference platform such that I can develop no more than 2
variations and address >%90 of the market (I develop two versions for iOS an
iPad and an iPhone version.) 5) Provide a market where I can sell
internationally, where people can easily buy my product, and where people are
in the habit of doing so. Right now that's three things the android market
doesn't offer.

~~~
wvenable
You missed the point completely. Yes, as a developer, having Apple handle
subscriptions and take 30% off the top is really no big deal.

But what if your app presents content developed by other companies? Lets say,
the going price for this content is $1. You purchase this content for 70 cents
so when you sell it, you make 30 cents of revenue. With Apple's forced
subscription plan, you no longer make any money at all. They take the 30 cents
instead of you. You could raise prices, but you have to raise them
_everywhere_ since Apple doesn't allow you to have different prices outside
the store than inside the store.

This is a mess.

~~~
ghshephard
It's a mess for the resellers who want to resell content on the IOS Platform.
Presuming that Apple is able to establish a relationship with the content
owners directly, then it is not a mess for Apple, the Content Owners, or the
users.

But, and this is a big but, this is _only_ true if Apple is able to reproduce
the experience and content richness that we users currently have through
Netflix, HuluPlus, Pandora and Amazon Kindle. Apple wants all of that
business. I think that, ultimately, they will neither be able to reproduce the
experience I get from those resellers, and they will harm the long term value
of their platform. They are killing the goose to get the golden egg.

I, personally, as a user, will be hurt by this new policy of Apple's because I
really, really like my Kindle, and I like having the freedom to read the same
books on my iPad and Kindle.

The new apple policy makes sense for the following categories of businesses:

    
    
      o Newspapers
      o Magazines
      o Music Labels
      o Movie Studios
      o Bands
      o Book Publishing Houses
    

It does _not_ make sense for:

    
    
      o Internet Radio Streaming resellers (Pandora and friends)
      o Movie/TV Streaming Resellers (Hulu/Netflix)
      o Content Resellers (Amazon, B&N, Readability)
      o Magazine/Newstands (Zinio/Press Reader)
    

All I can say is thank goodness for Android - it may suck for those of us who
really like the iPad, but, this new 70/30 policy has just breathed a _ton_ of
life into that platform as an option that all the content resellers will now
likely be flocking to...

------
Derbasti
So, would I still be able to read my whole library of books offline on my
iPad?

Seriously, if the Kindle app would get pulled from my iPad, the iPad would
lose half its value for me. That would be a terrible shame.

~~~
naner
You own a Kindle and prefer to read Kindle books on the iPad?

~~~
msbarnett
It entirely depends on the book.

My second-generation Kindle sees a lot of use for novels. My iPad+Kindle.app
get a lot of use for software books, textbooks, and other things with a lot of
fixed-flow content and tables that benefit from the much larger screen.

~~~
stcredzero
I've been using my iPad for software books. The speed of search/navigation is
critical for that.

------
underdown
Ah but what happens when Steve Jobs wants a 30% cut of all sales made on Apple
desktops? ;)

~~~
Derbasti
IF Apple would then take care of marketing, payment, delivery and updating,
people might actually use it. Developers would not _like_ it, since Apple is
providing these services for free right now, but the increased discoverability
in the App Store might make up for it.

------
mconnors
Can someone please explain- would setting up a book store to allow users to
sell their books through the app, giving apple 30% and taking 5% for yourself,
violate the terms of apple in-app-purchase?

------
ableal
[with Kindle for the Web] _iOS users can just point Safari to Amazon’s site,
buy the Kindle ebook, and read it right there in Safari._

I was also thinking along those lines. There's the issue of local storage (so
that one can read without a network connection), but the HTML5 features on
that front will probably be enough.

P.S. the iOS Safari browser neatly allows users to place a webpage link on the
home screen. It can have its custom icon, if defined, or default to a snapshot
of the page as visible. Also: <http://www.apple.com/webapps/>

~~~
chc
HTML5 local storage isn't ideal for this. It can only hold five or six ebooks
at a time.

~~~
tomkarlo
That really seems like an adequate number of books for the large majority
(90%+?) of users, esp when you consider that downloading another only takes
seconds.

Before Kindle, did we complain that you could only carry a half-dozen books in
your bag at a time? Not very often.

~~~
chc
I thought the difficulty of carrying several books around was the Kindle's
raison d'etre. I suspect you're right, though.

------
nika
I had the kindle app for about a year before iBooks came out. I bought some
books, but having had an unfortunate incident with Amazon taking a book I'd
bought away from me in the past, I didn't invest much time in it.

The Kindle app is so clunky it might as well be a webpage.

Once iBooks came out, the experience was so much better that I was happy to
switch. I now have several hundred books in iBooks, including all of my
technical books, lots of free books, pdfs, DRM free ebooks from people like
pragmatic programmers.

If amazon were to release books in a DRM free epub format, I'd buy them and
read them in iBooks too.

But for all the gnashing of teeth and exclamations from people who seem to
think this is the Great Tragedy of The Ages, I'm amazed that after so long
people haven't figured out Apple's priorities.

Apple does right by the customer. It is the key to their success. non-
discriminatory pricing is right by the customer. consistent-terms across sales
methods is right by the customer, and by the developer.

Imagine if subscriptions were only %10 while sales were %30-- suddenly instead
of buying your apps we'd go back to the way things were before liberated the
mobile landscape, where if you wanted Doom on your phone, you had to pay $2.99
a month to rent it.

~~~
chc
You seem to be glossing over a lot of details to make this sound like a good
thing, just because you like Apple and you don't like Amazon and Apple wins in
this situation while Amazon loses. For example, the pricing is discriminatory
— Apple doesn't have to pay 30% of all its profits from its competing service
to anybody. And shutting out entire classes of apps that are no longer
financially viable isn't friendly to the customer.

Imagine if Apple didn't take money they hadn't earned at all — suddenly there
wouldn't be any problem.

~~~
nika
Yeah, I failed to toe the party line that Apple is evil, and therefore
everyone else is good.

So long as ideological purity is demanded by ideologues, hacker news will
continue to be a thought-free echo chamber.

~~~
dablya
It's either that or "You seem to be glossing over a lot of details to make
this sound like a good thing, just because you like Apple and you don't like
Amazon and Apple wins in this situation while Amazon loses.".

Definitely one of the two...

