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

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.

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.

> As a developer for and a user of iOS this just furthers Apple's value to me

So, the disappearance of Pandora, Kindle & Netflix is great for the iOS user, because you can now subscribe without pulling out your credit card.

> They may not kowtow to egomaniacs

It is great that you make a good living off iOS, but labeling everyone who will be put out of business because of Apple's price fixing arrangement and prohibition of external purchase links as egomania is amazingly blinkered. All the discussion that has followed Apple's announcement is clear and simple, how egomania enters here is beyond me. If anything, what is amazing is your inability to appreciate the significance of events if they do not impact you negatively.

You're completely shifting the argument. The point isn't that Apple's latest mandate affects iOS-only developers adversely or even at all; it's that it is intended to destroy cross-platform services, or at least leech their money.

If you have a freemium webapp which finally rolls out an iphone app, you now have to eat costs for people who download the app and sign up through there. You don't have any choice in the matter.

How you went from that entire issue to comparing iOS and Android APIs, I frankly have no idea.

You missed the point completely. Yes, as a developer, having Apple handle subscriptions and take 30% off the top is really no big deal.

But what if your app presents content developed by other companies? Lets say, the going price for this content is $1. You purchase this content for 70 cents so when you sell it, you make 30 cents of revenue. With Apple's forced subscription plan, you no longer make any money at all. They take the 30 cents instead of you. You could raise prices, but you have to raise them everywhere since Apple doesn't allow you to have different prices outside the store than inside the store.

This is a mess.

When I didn't own a kindle I used to buy and read a lot of kindle books on my iPod touch. Even now that I own a kindle I share it with the wife, and we might both be on a bus/airplane without internet wanting to read.

I really hope this is not the way forward.

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.

I own a K2 and K3, in addition to my iPad. If I'm reading linear text outdoors in bright sunlight, or at the beach, I prefer the kindles. For all other situations (Office, Home, Bed, textbooks, random-text (references) - I use my iPad. I've got about 15 textbooks (though I ended up having to buy Radia Perlman's Interconnections from O'Reilly's "Safari Books Online" one PDF chapter at a time and read it through goodreader) and about thirty linear-text books. I'd say the ratio is about 70/30 right now in favor of the iPad.

I don't own a Kindle, but I still occasionally buy books in the Kindle store to read them on my iPad. I like the iPad for technical books and occasionally fiction. But reading on the iPad is slightly more straining than reading from paper, so for leasure reading I prefer paper.

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.

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.