Apple’s new rules on iOS app subscriptions have claimed their first casualty, according to the developer of Readability, which said that its app had been rejected by Apple for a violation of its guidelines on in-app purchases. The Readability service allows website visitors to read a ‘clean’ version of articles on the page without adverts or other distractions. Ironically, the company’s technology is employed by Apple in Safari 5’s Reader feature.
Readability falls foul of the new guidelines because it requires users to sign up for a subscription in order to use it. That subscription costs a minimum of $5 per month, 70% of which is passed onto to the publishers of websites whose contents are viewed by Readability users. The other 30% is, according to Readability, used to improve the tool’s ‘growing set of tools and services for readers.’
The company, in an open letter to Apple on its blog, claimed that if it implemented in-app purchasing ‘your 30% cut drastically undermines a key premise of how Readability works.’
The letter added ‘to impose this course on any web service or web application that delivers any value outside of iOS will only discourage smaller ventures like ours to invest in iOS apps for our services. As far as Readability is concerned, our response is fairly straight-forward: go the other way… towards the web.’
Apple’s rejection of Readability confirms the fears of many developers, that the rules would be applied much more broadly than newspaper or magazine-style apps. Instapaper developer, Marco Arment, was also critical of the new guidelines. Instapaper, which allows web surfers to ‘save’ articles for reading later, in a clutter-free environment, similar to that rendered by Readability, has free and paid-for apps on the App Store, but its subscriptions don’t add any services to its iOS apps.
Arment cited serious problems with implementation, noting that many apps offer paid upgrades to third-party services for which they don’t collect payment, instead directing the user to the payment processor of the third-party service. There would be no way for these apps to implement in-app purchases.
He gave examples of third-party Evernote clients, and apps that use premium services offered by LinkedIn and 37Signals. Added to that is the problem of defining content: ‘The paid features of Dropbox and Evernote, for instance, might be judged too insignificant in the context of apps to require IAP. If so, how much of a service needs to be free to get this exemption?’
The question, wrote Arment, isn’t whether Apple could enforce its new guidelines, but whether it should, concluding that ‘if you look at what this does to developer relations, big and small, it’s easier to argue that this is likely to result in more harm than good to the iOS platform.’
