On the heels of The Daily launch earlier this month, Apple has finally made subscription billing available to all app developers, issuing a press release this morning to make it official.

Apple has announced that App Store subscriptions are now available to every app, no longer an exclusive for The Daily. The new plan gives publishers the option to set the price and length of subscription, and then customers can review and manage their subscriptions from the usual account page in iTunes. Best of all, it appears that Apple has found a way to make publishers happy regarding their 30 percent cut from the App Store.

“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,” explained Apple CEO Steve Jobs in the press release.

“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,” Jobs elaborated. “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.”

Apple keeping parity with subscription pricing is presumably in an effort to prevent publishers from marking up App Store prices higher than those on their own websites, although how they will choose to enforce that remains to be seen.

Publishers can choose from weekly, monthly, bi-monthly, quarterly, bi-yearly or yearly subscriptions, and as predicted, they’ll be free to continue to offer subscriptions to existing customers without Apple taking their usual 30 percent cut of the sale. “In addition, publishers may no longer provide links in their apps (to a website, for example) which allow the customer to purchase content or subscriptions outside of the app,” the press release explains.

Finally, customers have the option to opt in to providing publishers with their name, e-mail address and zip code when subscribing to a publication, which should alleviate some publisher complaints that they lose control with App Store offerings.

It’s interesting to note that Apple has rolled out subscriptions without having to also introduce an iOS software update, as has been widely rumored for weeks. Or maybe we’ll see iOS 4.3 later today…?

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