And so it begins. Today the first developer abandoned iOS rather than pay Apple's vig.
Richard Ziade, creator of Readability, just announced that Readability had dropped plans for an iOS app. The app had been rejected by Apple on Friday, and after thinking about it over the weekend the Readability team decided they could get along just fine without paying Apple's vig (30% of their app's income).
Readability is a browser based reading app that lets you pull an article from a blog or news site and read it without the advertising. Of course, that deprives the source of the content of ad revenue, so Readability turned into a subscription service so they could pay 70% of their income to content creators.
This all happened before Apple got greedy, and as you can see they don't have 30% to give to Apple. It simply won't work.
The Readability app will work just fine with Safari, so as much as they'd like the app they don't actually _need_ it.
via Readability blog
Their reasoning would be more convincing if they decided to drop support for Apple’s ios before Apple gave the boot to their app.
P.S.
This is the first time I have heard of them. I was unable to determine from their website what advantages their subscription service has over using Instapaper/Instafetch on my tablet to pull down articles.
I assume I still won’t have access to articles on subscriber websites such as WSJ. Anyone care to enlighten me?
[…] this week I posted about Readability and how their app had been rejected from the App Store. Today I have an update for you. The following was tweeted from the Readability account yesterday: […]