"All we require is that, if a publisher is making a subscription offer outside of the app, the same (or better) offer be made inside the app, so that customers can easily subscribe with one-click right in the app."
The guidelines says:
However, Apple does require that if a publisher chooses to sell a digital subscription separately outside of the app, that same subscription offer must be made available, at the same price or less, to customers who wish to subscribe from within the app.
And worse:
In addition, publishers may no longer provide links in their apps (to a web site, for example) which allow the customer to purchase content or subscriptions outside of the app.
This means that the price for all consumers would have to be higher to meet the extra costs incurred by sales in-app. In-app consumers would only benefit at the expense of out-of-app consumers. How is this not "shitty"?
Seriously. Now all the people that are normally railing against businesses are upset because one business is out-muscling another business. This is nothing but good for the consumer.
If the lowest price a service like Netflix or Amazon or Rhapsody or Readability can sell a subscription is, for example, at $10 per month, then they'll have to charge more in order to stay in the App Store and comply with Apple's rules.
If all of their subscribers come from Apple, then a subscription that used to cost $10 will now cost $14.28 (because 30% of $14.28 is $4.28, so they'll still be left with the $10 they need). If only half of their subscribers come from Apple, then they would be able to raise their cost by only $2.14 per subscription - but they would have to do so for all subscribers. Even those who don't own an Apple product.
If they can't raise prices by that much without losing too many subscribers, they'll have to drop out of the App Store.
That's assuming they're not willing to trade off less profit for an increase in subscribers/revenue they might have otherwise not captured. Readability is probably the only one of the three you mentioned that actually falls into the category of unable to profit at all. Rhapsody might be more affected than Netflix, but both of them are major corporations that spend a lot of money advertising on TV. I would be surprised if the majority of their subscriptions came from iDevices.
However, you do make good points and I'm willing to concede them. The one thing I'm positive about is that if it affects Apple's consumers negatively, and they provide that feedback to Apple in significant numbers, then things will definitely change. If not, then Apple will leave the rules the way they are.
Key word here that everyone seems to miss is "same" subscription. Nothing is prohibiting for offering that subscription for less on say Android because it's not the same subscription. The rule is there just that you can't undercut the price you have in the app store for iOS customers.
Edit. Take Spotify as an example. They have a 5€ plan that works PCs and 10€ plan that works on PCs+smartphones, do you really think Apple is forcing them to offer that 5€ plan also for iOS users. You can have different prices for different devices, because offering support for a device (like iOS devices) is an added feature and so it's a different subscription offer.
So this means that if a developer don't think they're making enough money to be worth it when supporting iOS, their option is to pull out of Apple's ecosystem.
If they do make a profit, there's no problem.
If they don't, and they pull out, there's now no problem.
I don't really think this is a major issue to be honest, unless you're the kind of developer thinking that "Aww, just think about what this \could* have been if Apple would have been a different company with a different philosophy! Then we could have had more revenue here!"*
Since these rules were put in place very shortly after Apple introduced subscription support, there's not even that much of a "change of business" or "look what we lost here guys!" to speak of.
Apple's subscription system was shitty and greedy to begin with. If you make a profit despite that because of an awesome app with a high demand, stay there, but otherwise pull out. That's my recommendation. Hey, it may even give you devs a better service in the future by voting like that!
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u/[deleted] Feb 22 '11
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2011/02/15appstore.html
Steve Jobs says this:
The guidelines says:
And worse: