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> Cook used more privacy and safety claims to defend that system, saying it would be both insecure and inconvenient to let apps process payments separately Thi

> Cook used more privacy and safety claims to defend that system, saying it would be both insecure and inconvenient to let apps process payments separately This one is always funny to me, because sellers of physical goods are of course totally exempt from IAP rules, because it would be untenable otherwise. I can type my card number directly into the Amazon app and buy a paperback without any intervention from Apple. And yet it’s apparently insecure for me to buy a Kindle book with the exact same mechanism in the exact same app? Get the fuck out of here.

gondo 5y ago
Maybe it's time to start selling paperclips with an ebook (or any other digital goods) as a gift.
- wizzwizz4 5y ago
  I can imagine the listings now. > Paperclips for rent, will ship to any location within 2 metres of my house, must be returned within five seconds. Complementary electronic copy of my latest book.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    "Buyers may optionally choose to purchase paperclips for donation to a charity of my choice" Just imagine the confusion at Red Cross as they're inundated with hundreds of thousands of paperclips.
bredren 5y ago
On the surface, ebooks as a category of content make sense to allow direct sale as you described. However, your use of Amazon also serves as an illustration of Apple’s case. Among kindle enthusiasts, Amazon had notoriously neglected the Kindle product hardware and software platform. From neglecting Goodreads to stagnation, to not including USB-C on its very expensive Oasis product, the whole brand is a picture of “we don’t improve it because we don’t have to.” Kindle ebooks do offer interactive behavior like showing commonly highlighted passages and other light features. But in most of the hardware, the interfaces are very laggy in comparison to iOS. As much as text selection on iOS still isn’t great, it is certainly better than what you get on Oasis right now. If Amazon cared to create a stronger social experience around goodreads and kindle for iOS users any time soon, it will leverage a huge amount of investment Apple has made in their software and hardware. This is money Amazon had failed to invest themselves and it shows.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  If you're making a usability case between an Apple product, you have to use the comparable Amazon product: Kindle Fire. Amazon's eink readers are a completely different product class than anything from Apple. And on a Kindle fire the experience isn't dramatically different than any other android based system, and the kindle reader apps between Apple and Fires are nearly identical. Comparing an eink interface to iOS is simply not at all appropriate. Eink technology does not optimize for interface speed. It is not part of its primary design goals.
  - bredren 5y ago
    How do you account for Amazon's investment in making the Kindle Fire OS updated and valuable? Haven't they paid their own expense to deliver a comparable application? My point on e-ink was to show that Amazon has not invested in the Kindle product line. Kindle readers can't support any modern interaction. And that part of the reason the interface speed is bad is because Amazon has neglected to invest whatsoever in the technology. But to focus on the Kindle Fire app and its comparison, if you look at the most negative recent reviews, they generally focus on device incompatibility. If you look at the App Store reviews for the kindle reader, they do not focus on that. They focus on other common issues between the platforms. Device compatibility and support is a real value that Amazon Kindle users on iOS get.
    - ineedasername 5y ago
      Amazon has produced 11 generations of Fire devices, but they all serve a very specific purpose: a portal to purchasing things from Amazon. That means their innovation has come in the form of having the absolute lowest cost devices for their level of build and hardware quality. They've innovated in that direction, investing quite heavily. You seem to want them to innovate in terms of features: That's fine as an opinion, but that is not the only direction for innovation, and Fires already have the most important feature Amazon wants for consumers: a smooth integration to buying stuff. Eink readers, as I said, are a completely different product class, not at all comparable to iOS. And if you chart the progress they've made since their original eink devices there have been significant improvements. The kindle app on Android has a 4.7 star rating. On iOS it's 4.8. A few negative reviews don't mean anything when their ratings are that high. Whatever issues people have, they are outliers. I'm no Amazon fanboy-- I don't like them very much as a company. But they have absolutely innovated, you just disagree with the directions they have chosen to go with that innovation.
mbesto 5y ago
> And yet it’s apparently insecure for me to buy a Kindle book with the exact same mechanism in the exact same app? Get the fuck out of here. Gonna play the devil's advocate here. If I pay for a physical good, I have an expectation of continued use of that physical good absent of the use the technology medium I used to pay for it. If I buy a physical book and Amazon shut down, I can still read the book. If I pay for a digital good that uses Apple's hardware in some shape or form (Kindle is a weird grey area because you could technically use an Amazon Kindle device, but that is an edge case) then giving Apple money provides an expectation that they continue to commercially support App Developers. A great example - App Store guidelines that enforce a yearly update (or whatever the cadence is) to the app store so that developers don't get lazy and their apps break with new releases of iOS. I think this is effectively what Cook is saying - we need an economic incentive to keep app developers honest and in a symbiotic relationship with them.
- pretendgeneer 5y ago
  Why does a book reader app need yearly updates? I bought my ereader years ago still opens epubs fine without updates. If the epub worked when I bought it why does it need to keep updating? Why does an ebook only work on the certified™ app?
  - mbesto 5y ago
    1. You picked one example that I explicitly mentioned was an edge case. Thanks. 2. More importantly, if your question is why does <INSERT LITERALLY ANY TECHNOLoGY> ever need updates? Answer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_entropy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_entropy
  - amatecha 5y ago
    Right? Reading this discussion and posting this comment from an iBook G4 from 2005. It actually works great (other than many websites being inaccessible due to SSL compatibility issues). That said I'm only using it for the heck of it while the battery is charging… ;) Still, yes, I wish there wasn't such a constant expectation from tech companies to constantly update to the latest & greatest (complete with persistently-nagging update reminders, UX dark patterns, etc.) So much waste inherent to the industry IMO. Though people seem to just happily go along with it too…
bawolff 5y ago
Given how easy it is to trick users, i feel like that's a decent trade-off. Its untennable for amazon maybe, but every sketchy app in the world processing credit cards as a normal thing would lead to a lot of phising.

gondo 5y ago

Maybe it's time to start selling paperclips with an ebook (or any other digital goods) as a gift.

wizzwizz4 5y ago
I can imagine the listings now. > Paperclips for rent, will ship to any location within 2 metres of my house, must be returned within five seconds. Complementary electronic copy of my latest book.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  "Buyers may optionally choose to purchase paperclips for donation to a charity of my choice" Just imagine the confusion at Red Cross as they're inundated with hundreds of thousands of paperclips.

bredren 5y ago

On the surface, ebooks as a category of content make sense to allow direct sale as you described. However, your use of Amazon also serves as an illustration of Apple’s case. Among kindle enthusiasts, Amazon had notoriously neglected the Kindle product hardware and software platform. From neglecting Goodreads to stagnation, to not including USB-C on its very expensive Oasis product, the whole brand is a picture of “we don’t improve it because we don’t have to.” Kindle ebooks do offer interactive behavior like showing commonly highlighted passages and other light features. But in most of the hardware, the interfaces are very laggy in comparison to iOS. As much as text selection on iOS still isn’t great, it is certainly better than what you get on Oasis right now. If Amazon cared to create a stronger social experience around goodreads and kindle for iOS users any time soon, it will leverage a huge amount of investment Apple has made in their software and hardware. This is money Amazon had failed to invest themselves and it shows.

ineedasername 5y ago
If you're making a usability case between an Apple product, you have to use the comparable Amazon product: Kindle Fire. Amazon's eink readers are a completely different product class than anything from Apple. And on a Kindle fire the experience isn't dramatically different than any other android based system, and the kindle reader apps between Apple and Fires are nearly identical. Comparing an eink interface to iOS is simply not at all appropriate. Eink technology does not optimize for interface speed. It is not part of its primary design goals.
- bredren 5y ago
  How do you account for Amazon's investment in making the Kindle Fire OS updated and valuable? Haven't they paid their own expense to deliver a comparable application? My point on e-ink was to show that Amazon has not invested in the Kindle product line. Kindle readers can't support any modern interaction. And that part of the reason the interface speed is bad is because Amazon has neglected to invest whatsoever in the technology. But to focus on the Kindle Fire app and its comparison, if you look at the most negative recent reviews, they generally focus on device incompatibility. If you look at the App Store reviews for the kindle reader, they do not focus on that. They focus on other common issues between the platforms. Device compatibility and support is a real value that Amazon Kindle users on iOS get.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    Amazon has produced 11 generations of Fire devices, but they all serve a very specific purpose: a portal to purchasing things from Amazon. That means their innovation has come in the form of having the absolute lowest cost devices for their level of build and hardware quality. They've innovated in that direction, investing quite heavily. You seem to want them to innovate in terms of features: That's fine as an opinion, but that is not the only direction for innovation, and Fires already have the most important feature Amazon wants for consumers: a smooth integration to buying stuff. Eink readers, as I said, are a completely different product class, not at all comparable to iOS. And if you chart the progress they've made since their original eink devices there have been significant improvements. The kindle app on Android has a 4.7 star rating. On iOS it's 4.8. A few negative reviews don't mean anything when their ratings are that high. Whatever issues people have, they are outliers. I'm no Amazon fanboy-- I don't like them very much as a company. But they have absolutely innovated, you just disagree with the directions they have chosen to go with that innovation.

mbesto 5y ago

> And yet it’s apparently insecure for me to buy a Kindle book with the exact same mechanism in the exact same app? Get the fuck out of here. Gonna play the devil's advocate here. If I pay for a physical good, I have an expectation of continued use of that physical good absent of the use the technology medium I used to pay for it. If I buy a physical book and Amazon shut down, I can still read the book. If I pay for a digital good that uses Apple's hardware in some shape or form (Kindle is a weird grey area because you could technically use an Amazon Kindle device, but that is an edge case) then giving Apple money provides an expectation that they continue to commercially support App Developers. A great example - App Store guidelines that enforce a yearly update (or whatever the cadence is) to the app store so that developers don't get lazy and their apps break with new releases of iOS. I think this is effectively what Cook is saying - we need an economic incentive to keep app developers honest and in a symbiotic relationship with them.

pretendgeneer 5y ago
Why does a book reader app need yearly updates? I bought my ereader years ago still opens epubs fine without updates. If the epub worked when I bought it why does it need to keep updating? Why does an ebook only work on the certified™ app?
- mbesto 5y ago
  1. You picked one example that I explicitly mentioned was an edge case. Thanks. 2. More importantly, if your question is why does <INSERT LITERALLY ANY TECHNOLoGY> ever need updates? Answer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_entropy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_entropy
- amatecha 5y ago
  Right? Reading this discussion and posting this comment from an iBook G4 from 2005. It actually works great (other than many websites being inaccessible due to SSL compatibility issues). That said I'm only using it for the heck of it while the battery is charging… ;) Still, yes, I wish there wasn't such a constant expectation from tech companies to constantly update to the latest & greatest (complete with persistently-nagging update reminders, UX dark patterns, etc.) So much waste inherent to the industry IMO. Though people seem to just happily go along with it too…

bawolff 5y ago

Given how easy it is to trick users, i feel like that's a decent trade-off. Its untennable for amazon maybe, but every sketchy app in the world processing credit cards as a normal thing would lead to a lot of phising.