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Comment by josh33 | Hacker News Reader

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josh33·

Is an iPhone app against the iOS T's&C's?

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The 30% cut of in app sales has to figure in somewhere as well.

First time in a while I got a warm fuzzy for having an Android device.

Lack of an iOS player is interesting. I don't see a technical reason why Amazon couldn't make one. Ditto with an iOS video player for Amazon Video-on-Demand. Not making either of those (plus the Amazon Appstore & Kindle) makes me think Amazon is working on an Android platform of their own. They have the capabilities for a pretty solid media-ecosystem (music, video, apps, books, etc).

It actually looks like they could make the web-based UI work in Mobile Safari without too much work. (Easy for me to say.) The UI renders perfectly already. As far as I can tell, playback is the only thing that doesn't work. (But if you "download" a track it'll open in the built-in quicktime player and start playing.)

Despite the Flash requirement for uploading, they're already doing non-Flash playback. I don't have Flash installed on my desktop and playback works great.

Seeing as Safari has had background audio support since before it was granted to third-party apps, the web UI would be a decent stopgap in lieu if a native iOS app.

Here's hoping it's just a bug!

In a recent article about html5 audio there was a lot of talk about how safari intentionally didn't support automatic audio playback (vs. say chrome and chrome lite). I'm guessing that this would mean you'd have to click a button each time the song changed in your playlist - this would probably suck enough that it explains why they didn't launch with mobile safari support.

Damn, you're right. I'd played around with Cloud Player a bit last night in Safari/Mac, but I guess I never let it play two songs in a row. I just tried to play an album and it stopped after the first song.

Surely Amazon didn't want Apple to have any advance notice.

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