Apple’s New Subscription Rules Are Troublesome

Apple seems to have opened a can of worms with its new subscription guidelines. It has worked so hard to get the iOS platform to where it is today. So the company is justified for going after its cut of content sold on iOS devices, right? Publishers and developers are not seeing this as a positive development. Apple does not intend to approve apps that utilize a system other than the In App Purchase API to purchase content. Readability had to find that out the hard way as their application was rejected by Apple. That did not sit well with the Readability team:

Subscription apps like ours represent a tiny sliver of app sales that represent a tiny sliver of your revenue. You’ve achieved much of your success in hardware sales by cultivating an incredibly impressive app ecosystem. Every iPad or iPhone TV ad puts the apps developed by companies like ours front and center. It was a healthy and mutually beneficial dynamic: apps like ours get exposure and you get to show the world how these apps make your hardware shine… we believe you have every right to push forward such a policy. In our view, it’s your hardware and your channel and you can put forth any policy you like. But to impose this course on any web service or web application that delivers any value outside of iOS will only discourage smaller ventures like ours to invest in iOS apps for our services.

Apple’s new strict rules may be just a test to see how developers will react to them. So far, many developers have sounded their complaints. Some are even thinking of leaving the iOS platform to focus on less restrictive ones. Many content publishers simply do not afford to share 30% of their sales with Apple. The vague wording of these rules has concerned developers who are not necessarily selling traditional content on iOS devices. TinyGrab is another developer that does not intend to offer a native iOS client after this development:

Apple would now like a slice of our pie, which is fair enough. We’re more than willing to give Apple a cut of the sales that they assist in, but we can’t. They simply won’t let us. Never mind the fact that 30% is a ridiculous amount to ask us to fork over, considering that we already pay $99 a year for the privilege to develop apps for the Mac App Store and a further $99 a year to develop apps for the iOS store. Never mind that Apple also get a cut of any revenue that we generate from selling our apps through their stores, they now want in on our account and subscription service.

For what it is worth, an e-mail attributed to Steve Jobs indicates that the company has no intention of going after SaaS type apps for now.

We created subscriptions for publishing apps, not SaaS apps.

It would be easy to dub Apple as being too greedy here. The company does have the right to charge for subscriptions sold on its devices. The problems is it may have chosen the wrong revenue model and overreached as a result. The iOS platform is simply too lucrative for many developers to leave it. But Apple’s latest moves have shown developers they should not put all their eggs in one basket.