Apple ’30% or else’ Mac app store scheme
p2pnet view P2P:- There’s a lot of it going about, these days.
Extortion, that is.
It’s essential for Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music’s RIAA, and for shyster lawyers such as Righthaven’s Steve Gibson in the US and ACS:Law’s Andrew Crossley in the UK (was, in Crossley’s case).
Now Apple is at it, apparently.
Yesterday, according to Peter Kafka in All Things Digital, Apple “finally announced its subscription plan for its apps sold through its iTunes store: As previous reports indicated, it both allows app developers to set up recurring payment plans for iPad/iPhone/iPod apps, and mandates that developers who want to sell subscriptions use iTunes in addition to their own platform.”
Kafka quotes a Steve Jobs press release, to wit >>>
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.
Is that all?
That “may not matter much to subscribers, but it will to developers, who will have to hand over 30 percent of their revenue for all subscriptions sold through the store”, says the story.
In another All Things Digital post on the same day, “Apple’s new subscription plan has a compliance deadline. June 30, according to a memo sent to publishers earlier this year”, says John Paczkowski, adding >>>
For existing apps already in the App Store, we are providing a grace period to bring your app into compliance with this guideline,” it reads. “To ensure your app remains on the App Store, please submit an update that uses the In App Purchase API for purchasing content, by June 30, 2011.”
That leaves legacy apps like Hulu Plus, Netflix, Amazon, Rhapsody and others a little over four months to implement an in-app purchasing mechanism — assuming they can come to terms with the thought of handing Apple a 30 percent cut on subscriptions.
“I feel for those traditional Mac developers”, p2pnet quoted ZDNet as stating recently. “They’ve bled in six colors for all these years and now they’re going to simply be blood stains on the floor of the Mac App Store.”
Stay tuned.
Righthaven’s Steve Gibson – Righthaven sues Brian Hill: update II, February 10, 2011
ACS:Law’s Andrew Crossley - ACS:Law hit innocent people: ex-employee, February 14, 2011
All Things Digital – Apple Rolls Out Long-Awaited/Feared Subscription Plan, February 15, 2011
All Things Digital – June 30 Deadline for Apple Subscriptions, February 15, 2011
p2pnet – New Mac app store: ‘blood on the floor’, January 5, 2011
ZDNet – For traditional Mac developers, Armageddon comes tomorrow, January 5, 2011
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
World War III will be a global information war with no division between civilian & military participation ~ Marshall McLuhan
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February 16th, 2011 at 3:51 pm
The solution for mac developer is to abandon the mac for Linux and make it big. Start with lucid for example. This OS is a bomb in term of speed performance, capability ease of use and security, slaughtering both OSX and Win 7.
February 16th, 2011 at 4:05 pm
I write for a somewhat popular developer and this type of stuff is why we don’t even bother targeting Apple products. It’s Linux and Windows all the way around here and we can do without the headaches of the 3% of our potential market that use Macs. (As if the Windows users weren’t brain-dead enough.)