It's disappointing to me how quickly people lose sight of how the App Store completely changed the game for indie developers. <p>If you depend on the App Store to market and grow your business then you're not really delivering SaaS, are you? You're delivering iPhone software that is published and marketed by Apple. In that case, you have no problem paying Apple 30% for the business you otherwise wouldn't have. It's a no-brainer.<p>If you don't depend on the App Store to market and grow your business, then it doesn't matter much either way, does it? Either the cost/benefit of 30% vs potential new business is worth it or it isn't. Nobody owes you anything.
It will be great if someone from Apple officially confirms that the IAP subscription policy will not apply to SaaS. It will also be interesting to see whether they provide clear definitions for what they consider as SaaS.<p>In general, the mandatory subscription policy was a bad idea - for SaaS it is an even worse idea.<p>I think that Apple will ultimately back down from this policy (not just for SaaS, but for all apps) - partly because of DOJ concerns (antitrust regulators are looking at the policy as per the NYT) and also because they will lose a lot of apps from companies ranging from Rhapsody to Netflix.<p>Losing the "there is an app for that" slogan will be a huge loss to Apple and someone at the company is bound to realize that.
You know, when you can reliably expect Jon Gruber's opinions on a matter to lean pro-Apple -- when he does all sorts of mental gymnastics to make the logic come out right, no matter how absurd it sounds -- well, how is he not regarded as a shill?
<i>Sent from my iPhone</i><p>How does someone like Steve Jobs - someone who presumably has an inbox that is under a constant barrage of spam - productively check mail on an iPhone?<p>I don't get a lot of mail and still, the lack of junk control filters makes managing mail on the phone almost impossible.
Man, reading this stuff is like trying to figure out the US tax code. Every time I get more information on the new app store rules I just get more confused. At first I was really liking the fact that I could purchase apps and have them available on any Mac I use. Now I'm not so sure that the App Store is a good thing at all, for developers or consumers.<p>My personal feeling is that any contract that has this many rules and exceptions is probably going to screw me over.
If there's only one copy of an article stored on Readability's servers, then I'd say they're a publisher. If they store everyone's articles separately, then they're a service.