Hacker News Reader

Comment by dchest | Hacker News Reader

Don't forget to read customer reviews. Depressing.

That's my biggest beef about the whole thing. I guess you could argue it is Apple's prerogative to change rules, but Kobo and Amazon can't even communicate why things are changing to their customers. It really points out how much the App store is sharecropping. Making apps is not a viable business when so much about developing a business is the customer relationship.

It looks like a popular sentiment that developing apps for the App store is sharecropping. This pops up every time there is a negative wave of news about the App store.

Consider Amazon's Kindle app. I buy books from Amazon and read them on my iPhone and iPad. I don't own a Kindle nor other dedicated e-readers. When I get a Kindle, I'll be able to read my Amazon ebooks on it. I'll be happy. And I can continue to read my books on my iOS devices. I can continue to purchase Kindle books through the website which I always did. I am and will remain a happy customer (except I found out last week that their iPhone app truncates text depending on my font setting).

How is this sharecropping?

The part I consider sharecropping is the lack of communication with your customer. In Amazon's case they've been able to build a very strong brand with lot's of global mindshare, but they had to rely on a webpage in a Kindle blog to explain the changes in the iOS app. They couldn't even put a link in the release notes to explain the loss of a popular feature. In this case, it's sharecropping because you drop your high value branded crop in the Apple cotton gin and Apple decides what commodity that suites their needs comes out the other side.

I can't see them... but then, I don't have iTunes on any of the computers I own (not even on the Mac).

Are they within iTunes and the iStore? Or is there a web link I'm failing to spot that will let me read them?

Alternatively, could you cut and paste a couple of examples here so we could see what's being said?

Strange, I was able to read them in the main link just a bit earlier but now cannot.

Anyway the reviews were all asking and complaining about Amazon removing the link. The reviewers don't seem know that Apple threatened to pull the Kindle app if the links to the Kindle web store weren't removed.

Looks like Amazon is taking the blame on this one.

Interesting, seems the preview pages suddenly aren't showing reviews for any of the afflicted apps (Kindle, Nook, Kobo).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com