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Comment by jaaron | Hacker News Reader

If you'd follow the press releases or read the updated app store guidelines, you'd learn that Apple has changed the rules and is enforcing old ones in new ways that will affect Rhapsody, Amazon Kindle, Rdio, Netflix, and so on. The new rules would require Rhapsody to allow new cusomters to optionally sign up via in-app purchase with an ongoing 30% fee to Apple. The rules stipulate rhapsody _must_ make this offer if they offer an app, despite the fact that such an offer is unprofitable to Rhapsody.

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I'm sure it wouldn't get past the Apple Censor Board, but that's about the point that I would put in the in-app purchase button (for the item at 130% of my base price) right next to a "Click here for 30% off!" link. All of a sudden, your full retail price is heavily discounted and a lot more attractive!

The guidelines stipulate that the in-app price must be the same or less than your regular offer.

(You could possibly have a separate offer with iOS availability at a price that compensates for Apple's cut, which means you would get Apple's cut from everyone buying iOS availability outside the app.)

Technically, they state you must have the same or better offer. Better isn't the same as cheaper, it can mean more expensive with more features, so an "premium iOS offer with added features" for 30% more could be justified :P

They actually state both "same (or better) offer" and "same price or less" (just not what I wrote :P).

But I still think the idea is to avoid what would be perceived as an Apple tax when buying subscriptions in-app.

I stand corrected, it's more yucky than I imagined. I can imagine what's going through their minds doing this, but this is just plain stealing.. they want to drive off any one that sells products that can potentially compete with them (kindle vs ibooks?), but damn, again they're killing off everyone with a bazooka, again. It's like the dev license change to kill off flash apps that ended up hitting almost every top app vendor out there.

They might back down from this like they did for the dev license changes, but this habit of always changing the rules in the middle of the game regardless of who gets hit is really getting old.

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