Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
Its been disccused ad-nauseum 'round these parts for three months:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...54&postcount=1
The first "clarification" made it sound even worse, as they said that apps that accessed externally acquired content *had* to offer a buy-through-apple feature.
More recently they seem to have backtracked to simply forbidding any kind of app-based sales trick without an apple in-app feature.
http://www.the-digital-reader.com/20...ll/#more-18864
Unlike iFlow reader, Amazon's app isn't the only way their customers buy kindle books so taking out all links from the app is no hardship to *them*. But the really smart move by Amazon is wait to get their App bounced first. Some animals are more equal, after all... |
Thanks for the links. As best I can tell, none of the big sellers (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo) have commented at all, nor pulled their apps, and at least Amazon is actively updating the Kindle app frequently. The iFlow CEO guy knee-jerked and preemptively killed his own app. No other ebook apps have been killed, smaller readers like BlueFire are still around (though perhaps this might be why they've had no updates in ~3 months), and Apple's even changed the rules several times. Until Apple starts rejecting ebook apps or kicking them out of the app store, this is still premature.
As well, there are still ways around. If you can't sell books in-app and you can't have a link, have a string and instruct users to copy&paste (hey, a reason for that functionality to exist!). Or don't sell books yourself. If you're company A and you link to company B to sell a book with an affiliate fee, that's not the same thing as company A selling a book. Or sue.
Apple is probably in the wrong here, but there's no point in prematurely screwing yourself like iFlow did. When this came down the pipes, they should've
shut up and started working on alternatives (porting to Android, if nothing else). Then when Apple finally dropped the ban hammer on them, they'd be ready to say, "Screw you, Apple, we're going to Android/Windows Phone/Blackberry where we're actually wanted."