Of in-App Purchases and Inept Analysis

We don’t know exactly how Sony was han­dling in-app pur­chases. The pre­dom­i­nant spec­u­la­tion is that Sony was using some sort of link to their web-store sim­i­lar in fash­ion to the cur­rent Kindle app on iOS (although, as Christina Warren of Mashable has pointed out, there is no way to actu­ally pur­chase a book via Sony’s web front-end ).

Attempting to clar­ify the sit­u­a­tion, Apple reached out to the media. Quoting The Loop:

The Apple media has, for the most part, cho­sen to inter­pret this state­ment to mean that any app that accesses con­tent avail­able from an out­side store will be required to offer the same con­tent via in-app pur­chase or face expul­sion from the App Store. I believe that analy­sis is flawed.

Before lay­ing out my logic, let me state that I have no spe­cial knowl­edge here. I’m work­ing off of the exact same set of fact that the rest of the media is, but I’ve come to a much dif­fer­ent conclusion.

any app that accesses out­side con­tent may fall afoul of the guide­lines, since any con­tent might be monetized.

My sus­pi­cion is that, assum­ing Sony wasn’t doing some­thing utterly stu­pid link includ­ing an embed­ded store, the prob­lem­atic action here is includ­ing a link to a store­front. By that logic, all Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Zinio and com­pany have to do is to remove the link and let peo­ple find their web stores on their own.

within the app.

Until we see some actual action here, some­thing like the Kindle app being pulled from the app store, I think it’s pre­ma­ture to assume that Apple is will­ing to aban­don iPad sales to rabid Amazon cus­tomers over the pal­try sum that they’d get in eBook revenue.