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Comment by Atropos | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a programmer so maybe I'm way off, but I don't really see how -in the context of newspapers- the right to sell a native app on the appstore can be worth 30%, while a HTML5 version would be "free". And I also can't see how only targeting Ipad could be better in this context than targeting all tablets.

Because the population of people buying a yearly subscription to a newspaper is quite special to begin with - if you are counting on the increased publicity by being in the app store to sell subscriptions, I think you are doing something wrong.

Of course The Daily probably made mistakes as well. But I'm very sure that the succesful models of the future will neither be Ipad only nor giving up 30% to Apple without adding much value to the customer in doing so...

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The key thing is the App Store makes it a single click to pay that subscription.

I know I only tried out the Magazine because it was so simple to subscribe - and just as importantly, I knew how easy it would be to cancel if I didn't like it.

I never read the Daily, but apart from the Magazine, all the Newsstand apps I've tried have been utter crap.

Well it depends what their target market was. If you are going for "traditional newspaper readers", betting that tablets will replace paper over the long term, then I can't imagine stuff like "single click" to matter. I for one don't think that anyone having a physical newspaper subscription right now would change to a different newspaper because of this...

Of course that demographic is going to disappear and all huge newspapers have financial problems at the moment. But for example the NewYork Times web subscription has >500.000 paying subscribers... I don't know, paying 30% to apple for a better payment gateway seems just excessive to me.

>> I don't know, paying 30% to apple for a better payment gateway seems just excessive to me.

From a purely economical perspective, this is a very good point....

There's also the tiny problem that The Daily's content never did much that HTML5 couldn't.

The best thing I can say in The Daily's favor is that the app took advantage of the native frameworks for kerning and text layout, even if the hyphenation was screwed up.

For an app like The Daily to take better advantage of being a native app, there'd have be better tools available to content creators so that they can actually use those features. Camera input. Keyframe animations. Multitrack audio. Even, dare I say it, 3D content.

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