External Purchasing From the Kindle App

I remember emailing with Apple PR in 2011 when they made the change to force the removal of IAP in the app and a move that essentially shut down Sony’s entire ebook store. Glad we can at least go directly to the web, even if it is a regression from what it was until 2011 or so.

Leaving a second comment because it just occurred to me that for 14 years, Apple has made the process of buying ebooks on other platforms a more friction-filled experience than it should be — and than it was in 2008 — and to what end? Apple still was found to have violated antitrust laws regarding price fixing and forced to pay a $450 million settlement (I got $140 or something from the settlement, so thanks Apple for that I guess) and despite forcing competitors to have a lesser experience in their apps, it isn’t as if Apple Books ever achieved significant market share.

I won’t buy anything in Apple Books — the DRM hasn’t been cracked (probably due to lack of demand) and I like the freedom to read my ebooks on eink devices as well as my phone and iPad — but even without that, the Apple Books experience (page turning animations aside) was never good enough for me to not overcome the hassle of having to go to the special website Amazon built for the iPad or on iOS.

So they did all of this and I wonder what it really got them. Because last I checked, Amazon was the runaway leader for ebooks and I’m sure Kobo ranks behind them and Apple is probably a distant third.

@Christina It’s the same with the other anti-steering stuff. Apple got Netflix to make the user experience worse by not being able to sign up in the app, yet that wasn’t enough of a stick to get them to use IAP. It seems like everyone lost: more difficult for customers, lower conversion rate for Netflix, zero IAP revenue for Apple. Maybe it marginally helped Apple TV+ vs. Netflix?

I’m kind of resigned to some court allowing Apple to charge some fees, but I’d love to see them keep losing completely and forever lose their ability to tax all digital goods that happened to be purchased while using one of their devices.

If developers wouldn’t get smacked with some kind of anti-trust action for it, I wish all of the third party developers ganged together to blackout all their apps for a week or month and demonstrate to Apple just who needs who in this relationship.

Apple is the ten thousand pound gorilla, no doubt, but can you seriously tell me that people would still buy iPhones if they could not use Google Maps, Mail, Calendar, YouTube, Netflix, etc on it? I highly doubt it.

Apple should be able to charge fees for hosting apps, their developer tools, and payment processing and pretty much nothing else, in my opinion. And if they are going to charge fees for app hosting, they should be prohibited from forcing people to use their store front.

Agree with all the above.

How did people just accept the idea that Apple deserves a cut of every transaction on their platform in perpetuity, or suffer a purposely worse experience?

Now that the precedent has been set, I seriously hope it stands. It's now been very well documented that there's no actual justification for it. I don't see how it could be overturned now.

They've already started making the changes, are they really going to undo it? Would Apple really be that obstinate and openly hostile to absolutely everyone to take it away now that it's been done?

@ gildarts

The dev tools are what Apple is charging for. The “apple tax” is a commission for use of its IP (and servers, cloud, access to its customers, unlimited updates, distribution, kne-click purchasing).

Netflix, Amazon, et all can absolutely be on the iPhone and avoid that fee - just like in 2007 - that is, as a website in Safari. They can even “add to Home Screen” their web app’s icon just like 2007.

It’s interesting how we want to get paid for our work, but don’t want Apple to get paid for theirs.

@Someone else

If Apple isn’t getting paid by the cost of their devices, which are totally out of line compared to the actual price of the hardware, I don’t know what they are doing.

A less flippant answer is that I don’t mind them getting paid, I just want them to be subjected to actual competition and market forces. As the court ruled, Apple has been using their market power to extract above market rates for their IP. It is impossible to separate out the value of the developer tools from the hosting, intellectual property, marketing, and everything else that Apple says the fee is for because it is impossible, outside of Europe, to disentangle the various aspects.

We can guess that the market rate is going to settle at 15% or less for everything since that was the bone Apple tossed out to try to get people off their backs.

Look, I have defended Apple generally over the years previously, but I don’t know how anyone could have read the court documents and Apple’s internal communication and come away with the impression that they even believe 30% is a fair market value for their IP and other services. They have been extracting it for one reason only, because they could.

Another thought

> (and servers, cloud, access to its customers, unlimited updates, distribution, kne-click purchasing).

I frankly don’t care how much all that costs because Apple forces everyone to use it. If they wanted to reduce the costs, stop forcing everyone to use those services, problem solved.

You can’t force people to use something and then cry about how much it costs you.

> (and servers, cloud, access to its customers, unlimited updates, distribution, kne-click purchasing).

It's funny that there's a long line of companies that would happily relieve Apple of the"burden" of all of that.

There's nothing to it but an artificial barrier that Apple put up.

"I won’t buy anything in Apple Books — the DRM hasn’t been cracked"

I probably still wouldn't give my money to Apple, but the simple solution is to buy a book in the place that benefits the author the most, and then just get it from Anna.

"The “apple tax” is a commission for use of its IP"

No. This argument makes zero sense. Apple is not providing this IP out of the goodness of its heart; it's doing it because its devices would be worthless otherwise. I give Apple money to buy its devices. I want stuff like Netflix on my devices; otherwise, I won't buy them.

So, providing the infrastructure for these things to run is the absolute minimum Apple needs to do to make its devices worth anything. In fact, Apple should give Netflix money, not the other way around.

@Someone else
"The “apple tax” is a commission for use of its IP (and servers, cloud, access to its customers, unlimited updates, distribution, one-click purchasing)."

Apple should audition for the part of the Thenardiers in the musical Les Misérables.

The dev tools and App Store reviews and distribution are what you get for a $100(?) annual developer subscription. Next question?

"It’s interesting how we want to get paid for our work, but don’t want Apple to get paid for theirs."

Apple gets paid — it took in $95.4 billion in its FY25 second quarter. Some of that surely is thanks to price-gouging on storage and memory on the Mac, but most of that is thanks to having the most popular mobile phone brand, which is the most popular mobile phone brand because every major developer writes software for it. The notion that developers aren't doing their part to get Apple paid is complete propaganda on behalf of executives who want to bleed its developer community completely dry to please Wall Street, and it's crazy how many people just nakedly repeat it without actually thinking about why Apple is such a valuable company today.

I used to think that Apple should be more than capable of competing on fair terms.

After the Apple Vision Pro, Apple Intelligence, touch bar, butterfly keyboard, port less PRO MacBook, that creative collaboration app I can't even remember the name of, tone deaf depiction of the creative industry and Apple users in ads, well ... not so sure anymore.

The Epic store will be like a glass of ice water in a desert.