I wrote earlier today about an Apple/Sony spat regarding iOS app purchases. Sony’s reader app was rejected, and the internet exploded with speculation regarding what this meant. According to All Things Digital, Apple has in fact lost it. Apple spokesperson Trudy Miller says:

We are now requiring that if an app offers customers the ability to purchase books outside of the app, that the same option is also available to customers from within the app with in-app purchase.

This suggests Kindle and similar apps must now at least offer the option of in-app purchase (which means Apple would get a 30 per cent cut). I can’t see that being tempting to Amazon—instead, I imagine Amazon will pull its app.

Me, earlier:

[This] would hand millions of potential iOS users a damn good reason to seriously consider competing platforms.

However, I would hope that Apple isn’t going down that particular road, because making an enemy of Amazon (now the owner of Lovefilm, Apple’s biggest competition in digital music, and soon to open its own Android store) would be a bad move, and if Apple attempts to enforce its own systems and effectively ban the competition, it’s going to (rightly) get smacked hard by multiple anti-competition commissions and have the kind of PR fallout even Cupertino can’t dance around.

I’ll bet they’re laughing their arses off over at Android HQ, because Apple just handed its competition a massive PR win and the tools for everyone to screech ‘open’ at the top of their voices, forever.