Why Amazon Isn’t Worried About Apple’s In-App Purchasing Rules

It would be pretty fitting if the end result of Apple's new pricing rules were that everyone refocused on mobile webapps, thereby reducing the value of iOS drastically and allowing it to much more easily be supplanted by commodity Android devices.<p>If everything you're consuming is through webkit, who cares if you're on Android or iOS? Might as well use the one with better Javascript performance anyway.<p>Apple will still be winning on games but Google is clearly trying to address that with the recent pushes in NDK development and given Apple's track record with game developers it seems like only a matter of time until they do something to ruin that as well.

So, would I still be able to read my whole library of books offline on my iPad?<p>Seriously, if the Kindle app would get pulled from my iPad, the iPad would lose half its value for me. That would be a terrible shame.

Ah but what happens when Steve Jobs wants a 30% cut of all sales made on Apple desktops? ;)

Can someone please explain- would setting up a book store to allow users to sell their books through the app, giving apple 30% and taking 5% for yourself, violate the terms of apple in-app-purchase?

[with Kindle for the Web] <i>iOS users can just point Safari to Amazon’s site, buy the Kindle ebook, and read it right there in Safari.</i><p>I was also thinking along those lines. There's the issue of local storage (so that one can read without a network connection), but the HTML5 features on that front will probably be enough.<p>P.S. the iOS Safari browser neatly allows users to place a webpage link on the home screen. It can have its custom icon, if defined, or default to a snapshot of the page as visible. Also: <a href="http://www.apple.com/webapps/" rel="nofollow">http://www.apple.com/webapps/</a>

I had the kindle app for about a year before iBooks came out. I bought some books, but having had an unfortunate incident with Amazon taking a book I'd bought away from me in the past, I didn't invest much time in it.<p>The Kindle app is so clunky it might as well be a webpage.<p>Once iBooks came out, the experience was so much better that I was happy to switch. I now have several hundred books in iBooks, including all of my technical books, lots of free books, pdfs, DRM free ebooks from people like pragmatic programmers.<p>If amazon were to release books in a DRM free epub format, I'd buy them and read them in iBooks too.<p>But for all the gnashing of teeth and exclamations from people who seem to think this is the Great Tragedy of The Ages, I'm amazed that after so long people haven't figured out Apple's priorities.<p>Apple does right by the customer. It is the key to their success. non-discriminatory pricing is right by the customer. consistent-terms across sales methods is right by the customer, and by the developer.<p>Imagine if subscriptions were only %10 while sales were %30-- suddenly instead of buying your apps we'd go back to the way things were before liberated the mobile landscape, where if you wanted Doom on your phone, you had to pay $2.99 a month to rent it.