I can't has cheezburger

TechCrunch has reported that Apple has rejected an app for reading Sony’s eBooks because the app isn’t using Apple’s own in-app purchasing system to sell users the books. Previously, Apple’s stance has been that you can’t implement in-app purchases yourself in your own apps because that would be circumventing Apple’s entitlement to a 30% cut, but this goes a step further by saying you aren’t even permitted to give users access to the content they purchased if it wasn’t purchased through the App Store.

This is incredibly douchey on many levels.  First off, it’s a clear conflict of interest, because Apple is also selling this content, but doesn’t have that 30% cut eating into margins.  Secondly, it’s douchey of Apple to do this to an eBook reader app, because Apple wasn’t the first company to bring eBooks to iOS; Amazon was (yes, others had some apps that could download public domain material but Amazon’s Kindle app was the first mainstream eBook reading app for iPhone).

If Apple wants to be the market leader here, then they ought to do so by making the best product, like they do with most everything else they do.  Apple already forces Amazon and others to resort to a subpar book purchasing experience by making them dump users onto Amazon’s web site, but prohibiting Amazon and Sony from even having an iOS app really takes the cake.

I’ve been a defender of the App Store model of selling apps even in the face of criticism because I believed that the model resulted in a better user experience. If Apple is going to start unreasonably adding restrictions to its policies when there are already apps out there that would be affected by that restriction, it makes developing for iOS that much more of a gamble. It shakes users’ confidence in non-Apple apps because they’re worried that Apple may someday decide not to let the app exist on iOS, rendering their expensive collection of eBooks useless.

Seriously, Apple. You can do better than this.