4 ms·

It used to be ridiculous. It's now downgraded to merely comical. I'd check out the link above, but my understanding is that you don't have to pay to publish an

It used to be ridiculous. It's now downgraded to merely comical. I'd check out the link above, but my understanding is that you don't have to pay to publish an app. You might be referring to just publishing strictly to the newstand, though. In that case there are both "multi-folio" and "single-folio" options. I think the bigger issue, besides pricing, is content lock-in, as you note. I've seen some other systems (not Baker, I'll check that out) that offer "free" app wrappers for magazine style content but tightly control the creation process as a lock in mechanism (and I'm not even referring to Apple here). Curious: are you actually publishing to newsstand or standard apps? I'm wondering what the barrier to entry to the newsstand is in terms of approval vs. apps. At least with ebooks, it gets weird quickly on Apple's end (long long approval times for independent publishers unless you go through an "approved" broker, etc.).

tstegart 14y ago
Newsstand apps use the same approval process as regular apps, there are no barriers to entry except figuring out how to code for Newsstand. Once you go Newsstand your "content" no longer needs to go through any Apple approval process. You just publish content any time you like, and a Newsstand App updates automatically. The only thing that needs to be approved is changes to your code. Overall though, Newsstand is not very well explained in Apple's documentation, and paid subscriptions are a mess. We publish a standard app at the moment, because Baker did not support Newsstand until a short time ago. We will be updating in the next week or so. DPS pricing is still bad. Single edition only gets you one issue. One freaking issue! You need to upgrade to professional ($495 per month!) or above to publish multiple issues, and then pay $.30 every time someone downloads one of your issues. Compare that to setting up Baker (free) and setting up Amazon S3 free account (15GB data out per month) and DPS looks like a total scam.

tstegart 14y ago

Newsstand apps use the same approval process as regular apps, there are no barriers to entry except figuring out how to code for Newsstand. Once you go Newsstand your "content" no longer needs to go through any Apple approval process. You just publish content any time you like, and a Newsstand App updates automatically. The only thing that needs to be approved is changes to your code. Overall though, Newsstand is not very well explained in Apple's documentation, and paid subscriptions are a mess. We publish a standard app at the moment, because Baker did not support Newsstand until a short time ago. We will be updating in the next week or so. DPS pricing is still bad. Single edition only gets you one issue. One freaking issue! You need to upgrade to professional ($495 per month!) or above to publish multiple issues, and then pay $.30 every time someone downloads one of your issues. Compare that to setting up Baker (free) and setting up Amazon S3 free account (15GB data out per month) and DPS looks like a total scam.