Coming on the heels of the Sony Reader app rejection earlier this week is an ominous report claiming that Apple will require newspaper and magazine apps to offer in-app payments -- or face rejection.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Apple’s new deal with News Corp. for The Daily may be a harbinger of things to come. Publishers who currently bill readers direct from their website may soon be forced to also offer the option to purchase the same content from within the app -- or have their app turned away.
“Yudu, a U.K. developer of digital editions for publishers, said it recently was informed by Apple that newspaper and magazine apps that don't take payments through the iTunes store will be rejected, beginning March 31,” the report reads. “The company was alerted to the impending change when it applied for a new app and received an email outlining Apple's plans, Yudu Chief Executive Richard Stephenson said.”
In Yudu’s case, the company already processes their transactions through iTunes, but Stephenson noted that the change could come as a shock to others. “The implications are fairly serious,” the CEO said, noting that for many companies in the App Store their “whole business model is on the basis of taking people away from the store.”
To be fair, Apple’s policy will still allow users to purchase content outside of iTunes, but the company’s vice president of Internet Services, Eddy Cue, is laying down the law. “Rest assured that we want our customers to be able to get their publications easily both from our App Store and obviously from websites or other ways they get them,” Cue said at Wednesday’s unveiling of The Daily.
The policy change may be most unwelcome for apps such as Zinio, who currently offers a wide range of magazines and other periodicals from around the world, processing payments and subscriptions on their own website while offering the app to access them for free on the App Store.
Apple currently gets 30 percent of all App Store transactions, which includes in-app purchases for games and other apps. News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch confirmed on Wednesday that Apple is also taking the same cut from The Daily, effectively giving the publishing titan only 70 cents from the 99 cents per week it charges.
Given the low profit margin for third-parties such as Amazon Kindle or Zinio, their success on devices like the iPad could very well be an endangered species in the near future.
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jiubreyn
February 08, 2011 at 1:56am
On the one hand, I understand some developers may want to circumvent the royalties process of paying 30% for each purchase, however the goal should be to make the experience for the users as seamless as possible.
By requiring the user to leave the app, launch Safari, make a payment, then re-launch the app to continue enjoying their content is tedious.
For example: Free App a Day. You are able to browse the list of free apps available for that day, but are required to launch the App Store to complete the download. If you want to browse what other games are available, you must re-launch the Free App A Day app.
The workaround? Write down all the apps you want, then download them all at once from your computer or enter them one after another on your iDevice. Tedious.
