6 ms·

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

24 points by gaiusparx 16y ago

ableal 16y ago
[with Kindle for the Web] iOS users can just point Safari to Amazon’s site, buy the Kindle ebook, and read it right there in Safari. I was also thinking along those lines. There's the issue of local storage (so that one can read without a network connection), but the HTML5 features on that front will probably be enough. P.S. the iOS Safari browser neatly allows users to place a webpage link on the home screen. It can have its custom icon, if defined, or default to a snapshot of the page as visible. Also: http://www.apple.com/webapps/ http://www.apple.com/webapps/
- chc 16y ago
  HTML5 local storage isn't ideal for this. It can only hold five or six ebooks at a time.
  - tomkarlo 16y ago
    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.
    - chc 16y ago
      I thought the difficulty of carrying several books around was the Kindle's raison d'etre. I suspect you're right, though.
Derbasti 16y ago
So, would I still be able to read my whole library of books offline on my iPad? Seriously, if the Kindle app would get pulled from my iPad, the iPad would lose half its value for me. That would be a terrible shame.
- naner 16y ago
  You own a Kindle and prefer to read Kindle books on the iPad?
  - alextp 16y ago
    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.
  - msbarnett 16y ago
    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.
    - stcredzero 16y ago
      I've been using my iPad for software books. The speed of search/navigation is critical for that.
  - ghshephard 16y ago
    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.
  - Derbasti 16y ago
    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.
georgemcbay 16y ago
It would be pretty fitting if the end result of Apple's new pricing rules were that everyone refocused on mobile webapps, thereby reducing the value of iOS drastically and allowing it to much more easily be supplanted by commodity Android devices. If everything you're consuming is through webkit, who cares if you're on Android or iOS? Might as well use the one with better Javascript performance anyway. Apple will still be winning on games but Google is clearly trying to address that with the recent pushes in NDK development and given Apple's track record with game developers it seems like only a matter of time until they do something to ruin that as well.
- nika 16y ago
  I find it kinda amazing how rumor becomes mythology which eventually morphs into accepted fact. Apple has good relationships with game developers. They may not kowtow to egomaniacs, and it always seems a roll of the dice whether a given iteration of hardware compromises results in a pan or a plug from carmack. I develop apps. This is how I make my living. It would take a complete reversal of apple's attitudes and directions to get me to develop for android. Apple treats me well, pays me on time, and has a viable market where the rules are consistent and reasonable. Apple treats game developers well. Apple embraced OpenGL way back in the day so that developers could write to one API and deploy on multiple platforms (even Linux, presumably) This isn't Java, of course, but then, Apple also supported Java completely until it became obvious Java had lost in the marketplace (or market segment.) Apple provides great APIs and functionality to support games on iOS. Maybe Google will catch up, but they're still working on allowing native development. But this subscription thing is a perfect example of the disconnect between android lovers and reality. Apple has offered a new mechanism to make payments to developers. Do you think developers are angry about this? You think we're switching to android because Apple allows us to sell our software by subscriptions? Why would we be angry? This gives us more flexibility, and saves us the hassle of setting up paypal or whatever.... I've got thousands of customers, and I can assure you, less than a fraction of a percent of them visit my website. As a developer for and a user of iOS this just furthers Apple's value to me. I've considered porting apps to Android. I'm not inclined to because I'd rather spend the time making new apps in a market I know is viable for my type of apps. To win me over, Android would need to: 1) Provide native development (in progress) 2) provide a level of APIs and frameworks of comperable quality to Cocoa touch 3) provide a hardware reference platform and require android licensees to build to it (apparently impossible) 4) develop enough of a market of that common reference platform such that I can develop no more than 2 variations and address >%90 of the market (I develop two versions for iOS an iPad and an iPhone version.) 5) Provide a market where I can sell internationally, where people can easily buy my product, and where people are in the habit of doing so. Right now that's three things the android market doesn't offer.
nika 16y ago
I had the kindle app for about a year before iBooks came out. I bought some books, but having had an unfortunate incident with Amazon taking a book I'd bought away from me in the past, I didn't invest much time in it. The Kindle app is so clunky it might as well be a webpage. Once iBooks came out, the experience was so much better that I was happy to switch. I now have several hundred books in iBooks, including all of my technical books, lots of free books, pdfs, DRM free ebooks from people like pragmatic programmers. If amazon were to release books in a DRM free epub format, I'd buy them and read them in iBooks too. But for all the gnashing of teeth and exclamations from people who seem to think this is the Great Tragedy of The Ages, I'm amazed that after so long people haven't figured out Apple's priorities. Apple does right by the customer. It is the key to their success. non-discriminatory pricing is right by the customer. consistent-terms across sales methods is right by the customer, and by the developer. Imagine if subscriptions were only %10 while sales were %30-- suddenly instead of buying your apps we'd go back to the way things were before liberated the mobile landscape, where if you wanted Doom on your phone, you had to pay $2.99 a month to rent it.
- chc 16y ago
  You seem to be glossing over a lot of details to make this sound like a good thing, just because you like Apple and you don't like Amazon and Apple wins in this situation while Amazon loses. For example, the pricing is discriminatory — Apple doesn't have to pay 30% of all its profits from its competing service to anybody. And shutting out entire classes of apps that are no longer financially viable isn't friendly to the customer. Imagine if Apple didn't take money they hadn't earned at all — suddenly there wouldn't be any problem.
  - nika 16y ago
    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.
    - chc 16y ago
underdown 16y ago
Ah but what happens when Steve Jobs wants a 30% cut of all sales made on Apple desktops? ;)
- Derbasti 16y ago
  IF Apple would then take care of marketing, payment, delivery and updating, people might actually use it. Developers would not like it, since Apple is providing these services for free right now, but the increased discoverability in the App Store might make up for it.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
mconnors 16y ago
Can someone please explain- would setting up a book store to allow users to sell their books through the app, giving apple 30% and taking 5% for yourself, violate the terms of apple in-app-purchase?

24 points by gaiusparx 16y ago

[with Kindle for the Web] iOS users can just point Safari to Amazon’s site, buy the Kindle ebook, and read it right there in Safari. I was also thinking along those lines. There's the issue of local storage (so that one can read without a network connection), but the HTML5 features on that front will probably be enough. P.S. the iOS Safari browser neatly allows users to place a webpage link on the home screen. It can have its custom icon, if defined, or default to a snapshot of the page as visible. Also: http://www.apple.com/webapps/ http://www.apple.com/webapps/

chc 16y ago
HTML5 local storage isn't ideal for this. It can only hold five or six ebooks at a time.
- tomkarlo 16y ago
  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.
  - chc 16y ago
    I thought the difficulty of carrying several books around was the Kindle's raison d'etre. I suspect you're right, though.

Derbasti 16y ago

So, would I still be able to read my whole library of books offline on my iPad? Seriously, if the Kindle app would get pulled from my iPad, the iPad would lose half its value for me. That would be a terrible shame.

naner 16y ago
You own a Kindle and prefer to read Kindle books on the iPad?
- alextp 16y ago
  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.
- msbarnett 16y ago
  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.
  - stcredzero 16y ago
    I've been using my iPad for software books. The speed of search/navigation is critical for that.
- ghshephard 16y ago
  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.
- Derbasti 16y ago
  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.

georgemcbay 16y ago

It would be pretty fitting if the end result of Apple's new pricing rules were that everyone refocused on mobile webapps, thereby reducing the value of iOS drastically and allowing it to much more easily be supplanted by commodity Android devices. If everything you're consuming is through webkit, who cares if you're on Android or iOS? Might as well use the one with better Javascript performance anyway. Apple will still be winning on games but Google is clearly trying to address that with the recent pushes in NDK development and given Apple's track record with game developers it seems like only a matter of time until they do something to ruin that as well.

nika 16y ago
I find it kinda amazing how rumor becomes mythology which eventually morphs into accepted fact. Apple has good relationships with game developers. They may not kowtow to egomaniacs, and it always seems a roll of the dice whether a given iteration of hardware compromises results in a pan or a plug from carmack. I develop apps. This is how I make my living. It would take a complete reversal of apple's attitudes and directions to get me to develop for android. Apple treats me well, pays me on time, and has a viable market where the rules are consistent and reasonable. Apple treats game developers well. Apple embraced OpenGL way back in the day so that developers could write to one API and deploy on multiple platforms (even Linux, presumably) This isn't Java, of course, but then, Apple also supported Java completely until it became obvious Java had lost in the marketplace (or market segment.) Apple provides great APIs and functionality to support games on iOS. Maybe Google will catch up, but they're still working on allowing native development. But this subscription thing is a perfect example of the disconnect between android lovers and reality. Apple has offered a new mechanism to make payments to developers. Do you think developers are angry about this? You think we're switching to android because Apple allows us to sell our software by subscriptions? Why would we be angry? This gives us more flexibility, and saves us the hassle of setting up paypal or whatever.... I've got thousands of customers, and I can assure you, less than a fraction of a percent of them visit my website. As a developer for and a user of iOS this just furthers Apple's value to me. I've considered porting apps to Android. I'm not inclined to because I'd rather spend the time making new apps in a market I know is viable for my type of apps. To win me over, Android would need to: 1) Provide native development (in progress) 2) provide a level of APIs and frameworks of comperable quality to Cocoa touch 3) provide a hardware reference platform and require android licensees to build to it (apparently impossible) 4) develop enough of a market of that common reference platform such that I can develop no more than 2 variations and address >%90 of the market (I develop two versions for iOS an iPad and an iPhone version.) 5) Provide a market where I can sell internationally, where people can easily buy my product, and where people are in the habit of doing so. Right now that's three things the android market doesn't offer.

nika 16y ago

I had the kindle app for about a year before iBooks came out. I bought some books, but having had an unfortunate incident with Amazon taking a book I'd bought away from me in the past, I didn't invest much time in it. The Kindle app is so clunky it might as well be a webpage. Once iBooks came out, the experience was so much better that I was happy to switch. I now have several hundred books in iBooks, including all of my technical books, lots of free books, pdfs, DRM free ebooks from people like pragmatic programmers. If amazon were to release books in a DRM free epub format, I'd buy them and read them in iBooks too. But for all the gnashing of teeth and exclamations from people who seem to think this is the Great Tragedy of The Ages, I'm amazed that after so long people haven't figured out Apple's priorities. Apple does right by the customer. It is the key to their success. non-discriminatory pricing is right by the customer. consistent-terms across sales methods is right by the customer, and by the developer. Imagine if subscriptions were only %10 while sales were %30-- suddenly instead of buying your apps we'd go back to the way things were before liberated the mobile landscape, where if you wanted Doom on your phone, you had to pay $2.99 a month to rent it.

chc 16y ago
You seem to be glossing over a lot of details to make this sound like a good thing, just because you like Apple and you don't like Amazon and Apple wins in this situation while Amazon loses. For example, the pricing is discriminatory — Apple doesn't have to pay 30% of all its profits from its competing service to anybody. And shutting out entire classes of apps that are no longer financially viable isn't friendly to the customer. Imagine if Apple didn't take money they hadn't earned at all — suddenly there wouldn't be any problem.
- nika 16y ago
  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.
  - chc 16y ago

underdown 16y ago

Ah but what happens when Steve Jobs wants a 30% cut of all sales made on Apple desktops? ;)

Derbasti 16y ago
IF Apple would then take care of marketing, payment, delivery and updating, people might actually use it. Developers would not like it, since Apple is providing these services for free right now, but the increased discoverability in the App Store might make up for it.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

mconnors 16y ago

Can someone please explain- would setting up a book store to allow users to sell their books through the app, giving apple 30% and taking 5% for yourself, violate the terms of apple in-app-purchase?