Reminds me of the earlier discussion around Readability's for-pay service. This seems to be a confluence of several questions:
1. What is the value of a service like Readability, and what is a reasonable price for it?
2. What is a reasonable price for delivering a subscription service? (Also, where does this 30% number come from, why is it so magical?)
3. How will new services like Readability survive in an environment dominated by the likes of Apple (or Google, or Amazon,...)
Readability, a service which takes text on the web and strips out ads and other distractions to make posts more readable, had been planning to bring an app to the iOS platform. In fact, they worked with Instapaper creator Marco Arment to build it. It seems like it would be been a pretty popular app. Except it was rejected on the grounds that it circumvents Apples in-app subscriptions today.
The team is angry because they’re not actually selling any content. Instead, they simply offer a service with a monthly fee. In other words, they’re software-as-a-service. And based on what we’re hearing, they’re hardly the only such app getting rejected on the same grounds. But when things like Salesforce apps start getting rejected, will heads really start to roll?
Opinions on this issue vary greatly, but mine is that Apple has every right to implement a subscription service that they want you to use, but there’s no way they can charge a 30 percent fee for many of the services they wish to use it. SaaS is one example, music streaming services are another. At 30 percent, most of these simply could not afford to stay in business. It’s ridiculous. And Apple needs to either wave the fee or cut it down to some low single digit percentage in circumstances beyond traditional media publishers.
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