Monday, February 21, 2011

Implementing In-App Purchase

Chris Adamson:

The benign and simplest explanation for all of this is that Apple has painted itself into a corner, that it hasn’t really thought through all these issues. And if that’s the case, something will have to give: a bulk-submission tool, lax review of products, or (ideally) an abandonment of the new rent-seeking policy.

Right now, even if Amazon wanted to give Apple 30%, it would have to manually enter each Kindle book into the iTunes Connect Web site and submit a screenshot showing it loaded into the Kindle app. Then wait for Apple to approve it. And this assumes that Apple will raise the limit for the number of SKUs that they support; if they don’t, it would not even be possible to make the Kindle app comply with the new guidelines.

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"Right now, even if Amazon wanted to give Apple 30%, it would have to manually enter each Kindle book into the iTunes Connect Web site and submit a screenshot showing it loaded into the Kindle app. Then wait for Apple to approve it. And this assumes that Apple will raise the limit for the number of SKUs that they support; if they don’t, it would not even be possible to make the Kindle app comply with the new guidelines."

From Cupertino's POV, one would have to assume this is a feature, not a bug, no?

Why take a cut of Amazon sales, when you can attempt to cripple Amazon instead, and drive the dollars to the StoreMonster.

After all, if you buy your content from Amazon, you can just shift away from the iPad once other tablets get to "good enough", and take all your content with you. But if your purchases are locked into the StoreMonster, then you are locked into Apple gear unless you want to lose all your purchased content.

Content from places like Amazon is a kind of "middle-wear" that Apple would want to eliminate, in the Hobbesian corporate game they seem embarked upon.

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