Apple’s announcement that it had made the in-app subscription model used by The Daily available to all content-based apps, was met with barely a murmur from publishers yesterday. Where you might have expected a glut of announcements from content producers saying they had updated their apps to take advantage of the new rules, there was nothing.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that publishers are ignoring the new system — at least one app, the iPad version of Nylon magazine, has been updated to allow readers to subscribe from within the app, and more will follow — but it does suggest that many are less than happy with the rules.
The requirement to pay Apple 30% of all revenue from in-app subscriptions may be partly to blame. For publishers who have already invested heavily in developing apps and who, in some cases, will have to pay Adobe or Quark a royalty for every issue sold, that 30% is a significant burden. But it was hardly unexpected. Apple currently takes 30% of the revenue for Apps and other forms of in-app purchases, so it would have been naive to expect anything else.
The main concern is that, while publishers can continue to offer subscriptions to iOS content-based apps outside of the App Store, any offer they make must also be made from within the app. And worse still is that it is now a breach of Apple’s rules to provide a link within an app to buy content from outside of the app. This is what Amazon does currently with its Kindle app. Click on the Kindle Store button in the app and you’re taken to Amazon’s website in Safari, where you can download Kindle books. These are then added to your library within the app.
From now on, Amazon will have to offer Kindle ebooks using the in-app purchasing system and pay Apple 30% of the revenue. Users will still be able to buy ebooks directly from Amazon and ‘sideload’ them onto an iPhone or iPad, but that’s much less easy than buying them inside the app, particularly when, to comply with Apple’s rules, Amazon will have to price in-app Kindle books no higher than those on its website.
The App Store rules have been a constant source of controversy for a variety of reasons over the last couple of years. The latest update will do nothing to change that.
