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Steve Jobs Email Suggests In-App Subscriptions Don't Apply to 'Software As a Service'

Readability's bead and butter is iOS, they stand to make a lot of money removing ads from website to make them better and easier to read, without iOS, they would not have this opportunity to make $5 a month off of people. The app is free and hosted by Apple. And people don't understand why Apple is going to start demanding a cut of these sales. Readability isn't the only company out there making a lot of money off of iOS, Apple made these companies and they have now come to collect.
 
camelsnot said:
no one needs Apple. There are other platforms. It's a shame developers don't think they can live without $teve Job$ Just like people starting moving away from the Microsoft environment, the same can happen for Apple. Developers just need to be willing to do it, regardless of the love of their iStuff.

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And people are buying from those other platforms...They want free free free, you can only make so much from ads.
 
JoJoCal19 said:
I agree. While I appreciate that he usually has the inside scoop to Apple's upcoming products, he also sounds like one of the biggest Apple fanboi sometimes.
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He still at least presents his arguments well. You may not agree with his loyalties but at least he can back them up with consistent logic (I'd like to think we'd reserve the "fanboi" insult for people who just blindly follow and have not thought it through).

As far as Readability, if the new Steve Jobs email is legitimate then it will be interesting to watch. Readability most likely falls on the SaaS side of the line but it certainly can be seen as a content provider as well since it seeks to redistribute money to content producers. It effectively makes them a loophole for content producers to get around Apple's new rules.

I find it highly unlikely that it would be used in such a way though due to the split being the same and Readability inevitably only being popular with a niche of readers. Your mom and dad will not even know Readability exists. Still, this all depends on how much Apple wants to close this potential loophole from copycats.

I'm hoping Apple finds a way to clear this up so we can know what is going on.
 
Vizin said:
A clarification is desperately needed. What counts as a publishing app? Kindle, Netflix, and Pandora don't seem like they would count -
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And yet by Apple's rules, probably do.

But you don't see them screaming. Why? Because they know that their current numbers will likely just keep doing what they are doing, using the website. And that's enough that they don't care.

That is what irks me about this. Places like Rhapsody screaming about money they can't prove they will lose. Make the change, try it for a month, see how the numbers stack up. Especially if you can track it, how many existing members jump over to iTunes. They may find it is little to none.

But of course the screaming gets them tons of free press and PR so it is not a shock they are doing it
 
Somian said:
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148a Safari/6533.18.5)
It's about being much easier to use one account for everything instead of having to register for every little app, enter captchas, set up your payment, answer a confirmation mail etc. This is stone age and has to end.
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Every service that can also be used outside iOS still needs a separate account, a separate payment system, confirmation mail, etc.

How do you use Dropbox on your Mac or PC? Via your AppleID?
 
Vizin said:
A clarification is desperately needed. What counts as a publishing app? Kindle, Netflix, and Pandora don't seem like they would count - they're not publishing anything, they're distributing published content. As Jobs worded it, it sounds like only publishers of content will be subjected to the requirements. (So an app for a magazine, created and maintained by the magazine's publisher, would be affected.)
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But is Readability an app created and maintained by the content publishers? You could argue that they strip the ads and thus produce new content. But this is a very thin line here. When you plan a new business and you do not know until after you have created your whole platform and iOS app whether you have to pay 30% or you do not have to pay it, your business plan contains some big risks.
 
charlituna said:
And yet by Apple's rules, probably do.

But you don't see them screaming. Why? Because they know that their current numbers will likely just keep doing what they are doing, using the website. And that's enough that they don't care.

That is what irks me about this. Places like Rhapsody screaming about money they can't prove they will lose. Make the change, try it for a month, see how the numbers stack up. Especially if you can track it, how many existing members jump over to iTunes. They may find it is little to none.

But of course the screaming gets them tons of free press and PR so it is not a shock they are doing it
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I hope some day that screaming like they did stops getting focused on by the press and they instead actually try to figure out what Apple's stance is. Why did we get this purported Jobs email from a forum user? Really. Everyone in the tech media gets scooped by a macrumors.com forum user. They should be embarrassed if so.

manu chao said:
But is Readability an app created and maintained by the content publishers? You could argue that they strip the ads and thus produce new content. But this is a very thin line here. When you plan a new business and you do not know until after you have created your whole platform and iOS app whether you have to pay 30% or you do not have to pay it, your business plan contains some big risks.
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I think it isn't whether or not they're content producers but what their relationship is to content producers. Are they acting like a publisher or are they merely offering a service to the readers of the content producers while simultaneously compensating the content producers for the impact of stripping ads? Is the later the same thing as being a publisher?

Readability is one of those cases that looks like it could be either.
 
dcranston said:
This Steve email strikes me as a fake. It just doesn't seem likely Steve would use "SaaS" in a sentence, particularly with that capitalization, and on an iPhone to boot (that tries to correct "saas" to "aaas") He's not a man who spends a lot of time writing with proper caps in his past emails...why now, with a vaguely obscure term? Who checked the validity of the email?
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Or it proves Steve has been talking about SaaS a lot on his phone. My iPhone corrects the capitalization properly. You do know the spelling corrector is very personal don't you?
 
Cybbe said:
What about Bloomberg? USD 20,000 a year in subscription for access to among other things, news, research, financial data. Plenty of publishing in it. They have a Bloomberg Anywhere app (not the regular app). Of course it will never offer in-app subscription, and Apple would probably not be stupid enough to kick them out, but according to the rules they could say bye-bye bankers.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bloomberg-anywhere/id407761767?mt=8
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Yeah, Apple should definitely ask Bloomberg for their fair share of $6000, they'll take care of the payment processing as a bonus.
 
gturban said:
Could Bloomberg devide it into a service called iOS subscription and charge $10 a month for that and give 30% of that sum to Apple?
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And then everybody who is trying to cut corners would get an iPad and this $10 app instead of full subscription.
For sure, they could do a more reasonable division that would not tempt too many people to go the iOS route but then Apple would have forced them to de-bundle services and making life a bit more complicated for those subscribing to both the iOS version and the full, current version.

For Kindle, this de-bundling could lead to 'iOS books' and 'everywhere-else books'.
 
Night Spring said:
When a user comes upon a webpage that they find hard to read because of bad formatting, too many ads, etc, they click a button, and the page is reformatted. Your web browser also renders webpages, and most modern browsers have some kind of "strip format" option. This is just a more sophisticated version of that type of functionality.
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So, this 'strip format' as for example implemented by Apple in Safari via their 'Reader' function strips ad revenue for the content publishers but gives nothing to the content publishers. But Readability does give something to the publishers.
 
manu chao said:
And then everybody who is trying to cut corners would get an iPad and this $10 app instead of full subscription.
For sure, they could do a more reasonable division that would not tempt too many people to go the iOS route but then Apple would have forced them to de-bundle services and making life a bit more complicated for those subscribing to both the iOS version and the full, current version.

For Kindle, this de-bundling could lead to 'iOS books' and 'everywhere-else books'.
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I think you overestimate the industry's likelihood of cutting it's nose off to spite it's face. I like Readability but it in no way is a replacement for having your own app (Readability isn't giving out consumer data either, I believe, which is the main sticking point they seem to have with Apple's terms).
 
Marzzz said:
How much did it use to cost publishers to print and distribute printed text magazines? And how is that business model working now? Jobs is ahead of the curve once again.....
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And Apple is trying to ensure that any cost savings created by digital distribution are not handed back to the customers by slapping a 43% tax on it?
 
Seems strange that Apple wouldn't allow this subscription model work for the SaaS case, its more revenue for them... Maybe they will change their stance later.
 
What's with people emailing CEOs with poor grammar? It's not as if they are writing on a forum, so why not bother to proofread a short email before sending it to one of the most prominent tech leaders?

I think most of the emails sent to Steve in turn posted on MacRumors.com contain multiple mistakes - am I wrong?

-=|Mgkwho
 
I guess I still don't understand the exact definition of SaaS vs. subscription-able content..
 
manu chao said:
And Apple is trying to ensure that any cost savings created by digital distribution are not handed back to the customers by slapping a 43% tax on it?
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That is naïve to think that the consumer would benefit from the savings, just saying. Going the full monty in the iTunes experience would potentially bring in more readers than the 30% Apple is charging, it all depends.
 
I think it's fair that Apple wants a cut of the money that they generate by the user downloading a subscription App on an iOS device. The App publisher wouldn't have gotten that money in the first place if it wasn't for Apple.

But I guess the confusion comes in when the service is not iOS exclusive (Drop Box, Netflix, etc.). I would think the fair solution is that if the account is registered and paid for via the iOS device, then Apple should get 30% of the cut.
 
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