App Store subscription
[Update: Moved to the top due to some great comments and clarifications. There is more to this than the 30% cut Apple receives. Could this policy, designed to ensure subscription services (and other purchases) are made within the app, at least indirectly force all apps on the iPhone/iPad to function as silos ,thus never reaching out to the larger mobile web, to social media and other services? And if so, will this (significantly) limit their value, and thus the value of the ecosystem to Apple users?]
Apple issued a press release today that confirms and codifies its in-app subscription service. Bottom-line: if users buy a subscription (or other product/service) within the app, Apple gets its 30% cut. Always. And, if like Kindle, say, you kick users from the app to a website or store outside the App Store, that is fine.
But any deal/price/service offered from outside the app must also be offered inside the app.
“Our philosophy is simple—when Apple brings a new subscriber to the app, Apple earns a 30 percent share; when the publisher brings an existing or new subscriber to the app, the publisher keeps 100 percent and Apple earns nothing,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “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. We believe that this innovative subscription service will provide publishers with a brand new opportunity to expand digital access to their content onto the iPad, iPod touch and iPhone, delighting both new and existing subscribers.”
Bottom line: Apple gets its 30% cut.
As I've said before, I don't want books or other services you and I pay for to increase in price based on the codification of this policy. However, I certainly can't fault Apple. It's their platform, their device, their user. My hope is that old world publishers and services providers that I do like, such as the New York Times, for example, realize they can't fight this policy. And then embrace it. And move all digital. Rid themselves of the mindset of owning the subscriber and monetizing the subscriber in ways that, though they worked throughout the 20th centruy, are now dead. Their way is not the future.
On another point, given Google's scope in controlling our access to and the delivery of information, I'm increasingly uneasy with their further moves into actually owning information and in developing platforms for downloading information/media onto our devices. Things like music downloads, for example. However, in the short term, at least, Apple's big 30% in-app commission policy is just begging to be undercut.