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Comment by Maro | Hacker News Reader

Steve's very short reply is: "We created subscriptions for publishing apps, not SaaS apps."

His reply really only covers half of the relevant changes. The other parts are where they now require in-app purchases for any "premium content" which is accessed by the app and forbid links to a website to purchase content.

Subscriptions have nothing to do with the Kindle app at all and only partially relate to Netflix. The larger conflict with these apps and the new TOS relate to online purchases of content rather than subscriptions.

This response also isn't very useful because it is a lot more important how the TOS are interpreted in practice by the App Store reviewers than what the original philosophy for the rule was.

The rules and interpretations can change anytime too. The more iOS Apps and Objective C developers there are, the more entrenched Apple becomes and the worse their behaviour becomes. It's the MS playbook from two decades ago.

It doesn't help the ecosystem when you're circumventing the normal fees and rules, or using non-Apple technology. Pay your dues, don't cause trouble and you too can benefit from the AppStore.

So we should then clarify what the distinction is. I considered Readability to be a typical SaaS app, and now Apple seem to think otherwise.

Isn't Readability an edge case? Yes, they offer a service, but they also offer content. By paying out the content owners, they are positioning themselves as publishers / content providers. They do offer other peoples content, not their own, which would make them different from a publisher.

But they don't act as a "gateway" to the content, so I don't see how they can be considered a publisher. They are effectively an XSLT script run through a remote server. You say to readability "here, make this webpage better", readability doesn't publish a list of formatted webpages.

(Although I appreciate they probably don't use XSLT and I don't mean to demean what they do).

And ironically, they take a 30% cut themselves as well.

Like rain on your wedding day

>"Isn't Readability an edge case?"

Assuming it is an edge case, then Apple clearly pushed the edge further out to include more apps under the policy rather than interpreting the grey area in the developer's favor. Edge cases set precedent and the one set by Readability may raise reasonable concerns among developers.

Does this statement sound stupid only to me?

"We said you can drive a car, not a blue car."

Your interpretation indeed sounds stupid to me.

This isn't the first instance of Apple as the Thought Police -- what will the yarrow sticks show today in the iChing?

You pay tax for driving a road car, not a remote control car.

I think you parsed it as:

We created subscriptions for publishing (the following): apps, not SaaS apps.

Whereas the rest of us see it as:

We created subscriptions for [publishing apps] (apps by content publishers), not [SaaS apps].

Yes, that was the problem. Thanks for the clarification. It indeed sounded very strange to me, since I am not familiar with the topic.

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