Back in February when Apple introduced its subscription feature to take advantage of magazines streaming services moving towards publishing on iPads, they also added a term that meant that publishers had to sell their subscription content on Apple products for the same price or less than on other platforms, but also give Apple 30% of their revenues from subscriptions. Understandably many content providers were less than impressed by these terms as they work on razor-thin margins and could not turn a profit with a 30% reduction in income, and this has resulted in the FT moving towards HTML5 and leaving Apple’s walled garden behind.
To stem a flood of publishers moving away from the App Store, Apple have quietly changed these notably greedy terms, and now allow publishers to get consumers to sign up for a subscription on their own sites, circumventing the requirement to give up 30%, and then get consumers to download the app separately. They are still forbidden to have a subscribe link within the app the circumvents Apple’s 30% cut, but it is a start at least and may slow the eventual move to open and cross-platform HTML5 apps.
[via MacRumors]