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Apple’s “Greedy and Unjustifiable” In-App Purchase Rules→

Apple’s “Greedy and Unjustifiable” In-App Purchase Rules

Finally someone who gets the problems with Apple’s recently announced subscription / in-app purchase policy. Instapaper developer Marco Arment nails it:

But one argument that Apple should care about: this policy will prevent many potentially great apps, from many large and small publishers, from being created on iOS at all.

A broad, vague, inconsistently applied, greedy, and unjustifiable rule doesn’t make developers want to embrace the platform.

Android’s installed base is now large enough that a huge, compelling new service could launch exclusively on it. (It wouldn’t be easy, but it’s possible.) What if the developer of the next mobile killer app decides, for political or economic reasons like this, to release it only on Android?

A few curious paradoxes:

And what about a situation like Amazon’s Kindle app that will presumably be targeted for not selling Kindle books via IAP, even though Amazon’s catalog is so large that it surpasses Apple’s own limits on how many IAP items an app can register?

There are a lot of first- and third-party apps that access Salesforce, LinkedIn, and 37signals’ services, all of which have paid service tiers. Will all of these be removed from the App Store if they don’t build in IAP?

As Arnold Kim puts it, Apple’s policy is as clear as mud. I’ve said this earlier today in regards of the Readability rejection, and I’m going to say it again: it’s ridiculous to enforce IAP for “software as a service”. Not that Apple can’t: they have all the rights to do what they want with their platform. But it doesn’t make sense.

Apple needs to clarify many points of In-App Purchases for developers and content publishers, and quickly.

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iOS Devices Become Kinect Controllers In Dodgeball Game

In the past, we saw several interesting Kinect hacks making their way to iPads and Macs thanks to the efforts of a vivid developer community willing to get more out of Microsoft’s motion-controlling peripheral than simple Xbox pairing and gaming. In fact, we were able to get our hands (and eyes) on a free Kinect 3D viewer available in the Mac App Store and an iPad playing together with OS X in a cool futuristic experiment. But hackers, as usual, don’t stop at curious experiments that are worth nothing but a quick test.

A group of hackers last week managed to build a custom Kinect setup that allows iOS devices (iPhone and iPad) to fire balls in a dodgeball game playable by a gamer in front of Kinect. The UI design isn’t as beautiful and attractive as Microsoft’s version of the same thing built on top of Windows Phone 7, but as you can see from the video below it definitely seems to be working.

The video is available for your viewing pleasure after the break. Who’s going to build a Kinect Angry Birds with iOS devices as controllers now? [via Engadget] Read more

App Store Far Ahead Of Competition, But Growing Slower

According to a study on mobile app marketplaces by IHS, Apple’s App Store is still far ahead of the competition in terms of revenue and share, but it’s apparently reaching a saturation point where growth has become slower than competitors like the Android Market and BlackBerry App World. The chart above, in fact, seems to prove that the App Store is sporting a 131.9% year-over-year growth, unlike Google’s platform that’s steadily growing at a 861.5% rate.

In January, Apple announced 10 billion apps had been downloaded from its App Store, which features 350,000 apps for iPhone and more than 60,000 for iPad. None of the competitors have similar numbers, but especially Android is growing faster thanks to the variety of devices available and the amount of units sold every month.

Looking forward, IHS expects the global market for mobile apps to rise by another 81.5 percent this year, reaching $3.9 billion in total sales. The Android Market and other rival stores are likely to further slice away at Apple’s leading share, but the iPhone maker will still take home at least half of all sales generated from the app store market through 2014.

So far, 2011 seems to be the year of new features in Apple’s App Store. In January the company launched the Mac App Store and earlier this week they introduced subscriptions for iOS apps – which will allow consumers to easily subscribe to content using their iTunes account. [CNET via Engadget]

Fifth Beta of OS X 10.6.7 (10J858) Seeded To Developers

As noted by MacRumors, today Apple seeded the fifth beta of Mac OS X 10.6.7 to developers. Build number is 10J858 and, contrary to previous releases, Safari has been added to the focus areas for testing the new version of OS X, which already included Bonjour, Mac App Store, AirPort, SMB and Graphic Drivers. The new build is available now in the OS X Dev Center. No known issues have been listed in the documentation and the update weighs 20MB than the previous download.

Fourth beta of Mac OS X 10.6.7 (10J855) was released on February 11th. Apple has been seeding betas of 10.6.7 since January, and it is still unclear at this point when they’re planning on publicly releasing the update.

iOS Game Developers - Is $0.99 Too Low?→

iOS Game Developers -  Is $0.99 Too Low?

Interesting discussion over at Pocketful of Megabytes. The author concludes:

So is $0.99 really too low? Well, yes and no. It’s not too low, because that’s where it needs to be for games in this ruthless and uncharted territory to prosper (and because consumers love cheap goods), but it is too low because it inaccurately depicts the worth of a game’s contents. Without higher profits, money cannot be spent on improving the overall quality of the content found therein. Low profits mean low budgets and low budgets mean cheaply-made apps… the price tag is low out of necessity. It’s not ideal, but we’re stuck with it.

With $0.99 apps you attract more customers, but hard work is undervalued. On the other hand it is true that you never know what app you’re going to buy (no trials), but we also have to consider Apple’s 30% cut on those .99 cents.

So here’s an idea. What if Apple discontinued the $0.99 price tag, and automatically raised all prices to $1.99 – thus making it the lowest price point? Perhaps a more feasible business model for indie developers?

Would that stop you from buying the next Angry Birds or Trainyard?

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The Backlash Over Apple’s Subscription Service Begins

Less than a day since Apple unveiled it’s somewhat new subscription rules and unsurprisingly there is already some backlash from publishers and suggestions of possible antitrust investigations. The most prominent content provider that has spoken out so far is Rhapsody, effectively signaling that Apple’s 30% is not economically viable for them after paying music publishers and as a result will not be implementing the new subscription service and policy.

Rhapsody’s president Jon Irwin issued a statement and amongst noting that it would be “economically untenable,” he also noted that they will be “collaborating with our market peers in determining an appropriate legal and business response to this latest development.” This certainly gives the impression of possible legal action if that avenue is open to them and interestingly enough The Wall Street Journal contacted several law professors and reported that Apple’s new policy could potentially “draw antitrust scrutiny”.

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Fourth Beta Of 10.6.7 (10J855 ) Seeded To Developers

Earlier today Apple released a new developer beta of OS X 10.6.7. The build is the fourth since January, carrying number 10J855.

No known issues are reported in the seed notes, focus areas still include Mac App Store, AirPort, Bonjour, SMB and Graphics Drivers. At this point, it appears that the public release of OS X is getting closer, as Apple has been releasing new betas every week and the initial issues have been fixed and no new ones have been reported.

The third beta (10J850) was released on February 1st.

[Thanks, Bastian]

Want To Work On The Next Angry Birds? Speak Finnish? Join The Rovio Academy

Rovio reminds me of Nintendo back in the late 80’s and early 90’s: you can’t stop them. Not only did they achieve worldwide success with iOS games and consequent spin-offs (Angry Birds Seasons), they ported the franchise to a plethora of other platforms (including Sony’s PSP) and even announced a partnership with Hollywood studio Fox to create a special version of Angry Birds featuring the characters from the upcoming Rio animated film. Not to mention their own payment system, the Super Bowl, or the gaming network rumors.

Rovio is a fully-working, perfectly functional machine right now. And they need new employees. Who, this is the downside, will have to be able to speak Finnish. So if you happen to live in Finland (or know how to speak the language for some reason) and you want to be part of the Angry Birds bandwagon by, you know, joining the team, you should take a look at Rovio’s latest initiative, the Rovio Academy.

Game developers who speak Finnish and have C++ experience can take part in the six month training and recruitment program organized by Rovio Mobile, Saranen Consulting, and the Finnish Employment and Economic Administration.

Our goal is to take ten new talents on board, provide them with training by experienced experts from the industry, and hire all trainees as game programmers at Rovio. The program consists of altogether 26 training days; both theoretical teaching, guided on-the-job learning and on-the-job training. The application period lasts until February 20th, and the training begins at the beginning of April 2011,” explained Rovio Mobile.

Sounds interesting to you? Head over the official website, and try to become the next Angry Birds developer. [iPadevice via FindMySoft]

Developers: Xcode 4 Will Drop Support for 10.5 SDK

A notable change in the Xcode 4 GM seed Apple released last week is the lack of support for OS X 10.5 SDK, Leopard. Several developers on Twitter and Apple’s Discussion Boards have noted that the latest release doesn’t come with the 10.5 SDK installed by default, and even though it appears that it can be enabled with a Terminal hack, an Apple engineer confirmed on Apple Discussions that Xcode 4 final won’t support building apps for 10.5:

Xcode 4 does not support building for Mac OS X 10.5. If you want to build for Mac OS X 10.5 (obviously a valid thing to want to do), you need to keep a copy of Xcode 3 around. For example installing a copy of the latest version of Xcode 3 into “/Xcode3”.

The 10.5 SDK is still included in the Xcode 4 Preview 6 Apple seeded in January. Many developers who still need to build apps for 10.5 Leopard will likely keep Preview 6 or Xcode 3 on their computers in a different location, but admittedly Apple’s move to drop the 10.5 SDK within Xcode makes sense considering we’ll soon move forward to OS X Lion.

Xcode 4 development seems to be moving steadily with new developer builds released every few weeks, so we guess it’s possible that we’ll see the suite becoming available before the WWDC in June.