Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
I'm also unclear on something. It appears their ebook store sold ePub with ADE. Why couldn't they just keep the store open, work around Apple's cut, and port to Android? Android development is a bit more complex, but it's a sizable platform now.
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They almost certainly could. But then, selling stuff through Android doesn't really work terribly well on the whole (advertising is more effective, but not much good for eBook readers). Apple is still very much the platform where the money is, which is presumably why they decided to develop there.
iFlow just doesn't really strike me as a company than really thought through their business model at all. Even without Apple taking a cut, I don't really see what was going to make them succeed in a very competitive market, up against big boys like Apple and Amazon. And it's been predicted for
ages that Apple would clamp down on people making money from the platform while getting around the 30% cut. So it shouldn't have come as a surprise.
When you're a middleman (or even a middleman to a middleman), you're always at risk of getting squeezed. You have to actually add value to survive, and I don't see iFlow really did that (or at least not enough).
Incidently, I wonder if Amazon switches to read-only, whether that will satisfy Apple. It's not like people would struggle to find Amazon in Safari, so I imagine that might be a reasonable solution for both. Though really I don't have much sympathy for Amazon if Apple does push them off, at least until they allow an iBooks Kindle app.
