Wednesday, 7 May 2025
From Andrew Liszewski in The Verge:
Following a ruling on April 30th by the Epic Games v. Apple judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, Apple can no longer collect a 27 percent commission on purchases made outside of apps or restrict how developers can direct users to alternate payment options. Apple has appealed the decision, but is also complying with it in the interim, prompting several companies to announce app updates making it easier for users to pay for subscriptions and services. That now includes Amazon’s iOS Kindle app. Contrary to prior limitations, there is now a prominent orange “Get book” button on Kindle app’s book listings.
This is particularly interesting for me as I’m in the middle of building a cross-platform ebook reading app and bookstore and I’m having to seriously think about how users will get access to books.
In-app purchases for ebooks as they work currently are a non-starter, as John Gruber points out:
… e-books are sold under the agency model: the publisher sets the retail price, and the bookseller keeps 30 percent. But Apple’s App Store policies therefore make it impossible for a third-party bookseller to sell e-books and make even a penny of profit. Let’s say there’s an e-book that the publisher decides will sell to customers for $10. When Amazon sells the Kindle edition of that book, the publisher gets $7, and Amazon keeps $3. But if the Kindle iOS app allowed purchases of books through IAP, Apple would take its 30 percent first. Apple would get $3, Amazon would still owe the publisher $7, and there’d be nothing left over — not a cent — for Amazon itself. Effectively they’d lose a bit of money on each sale, and it would be impossible to make even a penny of profit.
You can’t even fix this by raising prices. Double the retail price to $20 and then Apple would take $6, and the publisher would be owed $14. Still not a cent left for Amazon. The App Store model is just fundamentally incompatible with the agency model.
My options are:
To include the bookshop catalogue in the mobile app, but don’t let people buy from there. This could lead to a lot of frustrating journeys, plus the rules state you’re not allowed to signpost to outside the app without jumping through many deliberately-onerous hoops. And you still have to pay the 30% fee.
Limit the shop to the web and point people to the app for reading. Again, not great. If a customer only discovered the app through the app store and didn’t know about the website how could they buy books? Especially if I’m not allowed to tell them about it.
Get the publishers to agree to a wholesale model for selling ebooks. Yeah good luck with that one.
So I’m hopeful that these new rules may change things for the better – I’d love to be able to add buttons that send users to the website to make purchases, though this ruling only applies to the US and is being actively appealed by Apple. It’s clear Apple are going to have to be forced every step of the way to do the right thing, despite their current policies damaging developers and their brand.