Apple Eases Rules For Subscription Apps

pjfontillas writes "Apple has quietly reversed their decision that required publishers who sell content and subscriptions in their iPhone and iPad apps to go through iTunes, with Apple taking a 30% cut. It's not so quiet in the workplace, however, as this news has a pretty big influence on developer workloads. Here at The New York Times our developers breathed a sigh of relief once we realized we don't have try and work around that requirement like The Financial Times did. Apple seems to have been doing much better with their community (consumers and developers alike) recently." Reader imamac notes that Apple has also filed a motion to intervene in the Lodsys patent suit against several iOS app developers that we've been following.

The devil is in the details

[QuasiSteve]

Note that the devil is in the details.

While Apple will

• no longer require publishers to also sell through iTunes
• publishers are now allowed to charge more through iTunes if they so desire

They're still bound to some rules:

• If a subscription is offered through the app, it must go through iTunes
• a subscription through iTunes still nets Apple the 30%
• customer data is still not made available to the publishers (unless the user so chooses, and the data provided in that case is limited)
• Publishers may not use an UI element (button) that redirects to their own subscription portal

In other words.. they can offer the subscription elsewhere, but they're not allowed to make it easy for users to pick up said subscription.

It's still an improvement (for publishers, for users I'm sure the proposed earlier method was already ideal) as publishers can now at least offset the Apple take through price differentiation - but it still has its idiosyncrasies.