Why Amazon Isn’t Worried About Apple’s In-App Purchasing Rules

by gaiusparx • 15 years ago

24 30 15 years ago

ableal• 15 years ago

[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/

chc5• 15 years ago

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

tomkarlo• 15 years ago

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.

Derbasti3• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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

alextp• 15 years ago

When I didn't own a kindle I used to buy and read a lot of kindle books on my iPod touch. Even now that I own a kindle I share it with the wife, and we might both be on a bus/airplane without internet wanting to read.

I really hope this is not the way forward.

msbarnett• 15 years ago

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.

ghshephard2• 15 years ago

I own a K2 and K3, in addition to my iPad. If I'm reading linear text outdoors in bright sunlight, or at the beach, I prefer the kindles. For all other situations (Office, Home, Bed, textbooks, random-text (references) - I use my iPad. I've got about 15 textbooks (though I ended up having to buy Radia Perlman's Interconnections from O'Reilly's "Safari Books Online" one PDF chapter at a time and read it through goodreader) and about thirty linear-text books. I'd say the ratio is about 70/30 right now in favor of the iPad.

Derbasti3• 15 years ago

I don't own a Kindle, but I still occasionally buy books in the Kindle store to read them on my iPad. I like the iPad for technical books and occasionally fiction. But reading on the iPad is slightly more straining than reading from paper, so for leasure reading I prefer paper.

georgemcbay• 15 years ago

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.

nika3• 15 years ago

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.

chc5• 15 years ago

The "subscription thing" is not what you describe. Apple haven't offered a mechanism to make payments — if that were all they'd done, I think people would be fine with it. What they've done is mandated a mechanism that takes money out of your pocket. Yes, developers are angry about it: see http://blog.tinygrab.com/2011/02/21/tinygrab-apples-app-stor... . From the way you talk about it, it sounds like you didn't depend on subscription revenue in the first place, so you just happened not to be affected by this particular policy.

When you say Apple treats you well, you mean Apple hasn't yet changed the rules against you. Apple treated Pandora well until recently.

NetMonkey• 15 years ago

And if all Apple wants is to have shiny games for their platform it is the perfect strategy.

We have an online platform that resells content which is how we make our living. Low margins means that we would take a loss on everything we sold through the App store since we cannot charge more in the Apple garden.

Combine that with having to learn a new platform or hire new developers, it's making a HTML(5) solution for mobile devices look much more interesting for us. It won't look and feel as nice, but at least it will be cheaper to develop, we will get presence on Android/WinPhone7 and we won't take a loss on every item sold.

I agree that for a game developer the Apple solution is pretty good - I wouldn't mind it myself. But when reselling content it's simply a much different proposition - and I'm pretty there are many other companies having the same considerations that we are.

zohebv• 15 years ago

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

So, the disappearance of Pandora, Kindle & Netflix is great for the iOS user, because you can now subscribe without pulling out your credit card.

> They may not kowtow to egomaniacs

It is great that you make a good living off iOS, but labeling everyone who will be put out of business because of Apple's price fixing arrangement and prohibition of external purchase links as egomania is amazingly blinkered. All the discussion that has followed Apple's announcement is clear and simple, how egomania enters here is beyond me. If anything, what is amazing is your inability to appreciate the significance of events if they do not impact you negatively.

Pahalial• 15 years ago

You're completely shifting the argument. The point isn't that Apple's latest mandate affects iOS-only developers adversely or even at all; it's that it is intended to destroy cross-platform services, or at least leech their money.

If you have a freemium webapp which finally rolls out an iphone app, you now have to eat costs for people who download the app and sign up through there. You don't have any choice in the matter.

How you went from that entire issue to comparing iOS and Android APIs, I frankly have no idea.

wvenable• 15 years ago

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.

stcredzero2• 15 years ago

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.

Yes, but what about reading offline? Is the convenience of using the iPad going to suffer?

mconnors2• 15 years ago

The problem I am having-

1 can't sell the app itself, 2 the app doesn't live on the phone screen (unless they make a bookmark-button) 3 even though its 30% users are already tied into the store which lowers the mental barrier to purchase, meaning you don't have to get their credit card info. 4 no push notification

nika3• 15 years ago

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.

chc5• 15 years ago

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.

nika3• 15 years ago

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.

metageek• 15 years ago

>If amazon were to release books in a DRM free epub format

Note that ibooks doesn't even give the author the option of publishing their ePub without DRM.

underdown• 15 years ago

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

Derbasti3• 15 years ago

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.

mconnors2• 15 years ago

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?

Why Amazon Isn’t Worried About Apple’s In-App Purchasing Rules

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