The Financial Times Tries An Apple End-Run

"Even more problematic for print publishers like Pearson’s FT is Apple’s insistence on keeping subscriber data like credit card information to itself."

That's a very interesting point. Personally, as a consumer, Apple doing the bill is a great benefit to me. Similarly, my magazine subscriptions are through Amazon because they are so easy to manage. The magazine may be losing whatever Amazon's cut is, but if I had to deal with each one individually, several of them would be getting zero money.

I just tried to use this web app. It took about 5 minutes to load!

I think they are actually loading the entire paper when you hit the app home page, instead of just an index page. Either that or a truly mammoth tangle of (cross compiled?) javascript.

There is even a dedicated "loading" splash screen and progress bar. "If you are not on wifi this may take a while." Ugh. FT, you're doing it wrong.

I've read the FT for years in print.

Still one of the only publications I would subscribe to (cf the economist, nyt). They were also a client of mine about 10 years ago and at that point I remember complaining specifically and at length in meetings with them about the poor state of their website. Amazingly, the design of the actual content pages has remained unchanged since then. The plastered on content homepages are like wallpaper over crumbling drywall.

Doing an end run around a popular platform can absolutely be done, but get your house in order first. Right now this just smells like a company that couldn't figure out the web for a decade, wants in on mobile, but hasn't figured out that you have to execute on the table-stakes of the web first. Otherwise you are the daily.

I still like the sloppy, porous, crazy paywall of the NYT and the mobile/web stuff they are doing. Best in show so far.

To me this is just one of the early cases of what will become an inevitable trend. Not just to avoid Apple licensing policies but also to target multiple platforms with one app. HTML5 is rapidly hitting a tipping point that allows for more complete user experiences in a web app and the further that progresses the more this will become the norm. For a content delivery site/app like this it's really a no brainer... that's what HTML was meant to do from day one.

Compared to native apps it's a poor experience. Awkward, clunky and unresponsive. If anything I think this strengthens Apple's hand rather than weakening it.

The FT is an outlier... their fans (including me) are stark, raving fans who will put up with an ugly interface to get at the content.