App Stores A piece in the New York Times Tuesday set off a torrent of speculation over an alleged new move by Apple to “tighten control over [its] app store.” The story paraphrased Steve Haber, president of Sony’s digital reader business, saying Sony had been told by Apple that “some applications developers, including Sony… can no longer sell content, like e-books, within their apps, or let customers have access to purchases they have made outside the App Store.”
The hook for the piece was Apple’s apparent rejection of Sony’s e-reader app for the iPad, which let users buy e-books through the Sony Reader Store and to access e-books they had already purchased there from their iPad. From now on, Apple allegedly told Sony, “all in-app purchases would have to go through Apple,” which takes a 30 percent cut of all such transactions.
Sony issued a statement on its e-reader blog that it was withdrawing the app, at least for now:
We created an app that we’re very excited about, which includes all the features you’ve come to expect from a mobile reading application – including access to your existing collection, synching with your Reader Daily Edition™ and purchasing new content as is possible on other mobile platforms.
Unfortunately, with little notice, Apple changed the way it enforces its rules and this will prevent the current version of the Reader™ for iPhone® from being available in the app store. We opened a dialog with Apple to see if we can come up with an equitable resolution but reached an impasse at this time.
The blogosphere quickly seized on the report as evidence that Apple was going to war with third-party app developers that sell content that competes with Apple’s iTunes. Amazon’s Kindle app, it was imagined, might soon be history on the iPad, to say nothing of the Netflix and Hulu apps.
The furor grew so loud that Apple finally issued a two-sentence statement throwing cold water on the Times’ report. According to spokesperson Trudy Muller:
We have not changed our developer terms or guidelines. We are now requiring that if an app offers customers the ability to purchase books outside of the app, that the same option is also available to customers from within the app with in-app purchase.
The Times has now posted an updated version of its original report to include Apple’s “clarification” but still insisting there could be some there, there:
The [new] requirement may signal a shift for Apple. The company has made more money selling hardware than music, e-books or apps. If people could have access to more content from more sources on their iPhones and iPads, the thinking went, then they would buy more devices.
The move is also surprising, as Apple has indicated recently that it would be more collaborative, not less, with magazine publishers and other content producers that want more control over how to distribute content on the iPad.
Why all the confusion? The Times, like most of the commentators who seized on the original report, mis-read Apple’s move as aimed fundamentally at other content providers (in fairness to the Times, Sony seems to have read it that way, too). But then why single out Sony? After all, as many commentators noted, Amazon sells a lot more e-books on the iPad than Sony does?
The reason is that Amazon already enables in-app purchases in the Kindle app. As do many other iPad app developers. The reason for singling out the Sony app is that it routes all purchases through a browser. Not only does that cut Apple out of the transaction (no doubt a factor in its decision), it conflicts with Apple’s broader strategy to lure media content out of standards-based browsers and into proprietary apps, preferably Apple’s.
As I noted at the time of its introduction, the iPad is an anti-browser, anti-Internet device, at least as far as media content is concerned. While it includes a browser for now because it must, the device is only truly optimized for accessing and running proprietary, self-executing apps. It’s hard to type on, frustrating one of the main input modes used by browsers, there is no way to side-load content downloaded through a browser onto the device because it doesn’t support removable media, and of course, it doesn’t support Flash, the format of choice for most browser-based video content.
Why the hostility to browsers? The browser is really Google’s and Microsoft’s turf. They have mechanisms in place to monetize browser use through search-based advertising while Apple does not. Since its inception, the iTunes App Store has been aimed at establishing a new, non-browser based, non-search driven paradigm for distributing and consuming digital content, on turf friendly to Apple.
That’s not a strategy that is inherently hostile to other content providers. Apart from Apple’s 30 percent vig, there are distinct advantages to distributing content in app form rather than through a browser. It’s far more secure and gives the publisher far-greater control over the user experience.
Sony’s mistake was to break the Golden Apple Rule: No browser-only content on the iPad. But that doesn’t mean Apple was picking on Sony, or that the same fate awaits other app developers that avoid Sony’s mistake.