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

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

#11

Post by nika »

chc wrote: post #7
nika wrote: post #5

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 o…

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…

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.

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

#12

Post by chc »

nika wrote: post #8
georgemcbay wrote: post #4

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 sti…

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 dir…

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.

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

#13

Post by tomkarlo »

chc wrote: post #10
ableal wrote: post #2

[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…

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

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.

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

#14

Post by chc »

nika wrote: post #11
chc wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Please don't try to turn this into drama. That isn't what I said at all. Going overboard in praise of Apple is no better than going overboard in the opposite direction.

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

#15

Post by NetMonkey »

nika wrote: post #8
georgemcbay wrote: post #4

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 sti…

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 dir…

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.

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

#16

Post by dablya »

nika wrote: post #11
chc wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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...

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

#19

Post by metageek »

nika wrote: post #5

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 o…

>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.

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

#20

Post by msbarnett »

naner wrote: post #6
Derbasti wrote: post #3

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.

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

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.

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