The New York Post quotes analyst Ezra Gottheil:

If you want to get a device out—if you’re [a manufacturer]—do you have to go with what’s available right now or do you wait for the next generation to come out?

If you’re Apple and what’s available’s not good enough, you wait. If you’re pretty much everyone else, you don’t, and you risk releasing sub-optimal hardware, like the Galaxy Tab. Oddly, most of the market still doesn’t get this.

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.

Broken Rules provides some interesting graphs relating to And Yet It Moves sales versus pricing on the Mac App Store, resulting in this conclusion:

In the end, we learned: the lower the price the higher the revenue.

This is also the case on the iOS store, where games like Pac-Man top the chart at 59p but vanish without a trace when they’re priced much higher. It’s baffling that the likes of Namco don’t settle on lower price-points all year round.

Mind you, even more baffling is that the Broken Rules game is currently back at $9.99, despite the company stating the following in its blog post:

[…] we quickly realized that the App Store is not a place where a $9.99 game is easily bought. Established brands might launch at this price point, but our first hours proved that we would get nowhere at $9.99. So we soon dropped the price

Now this is interesting. Andriasang reports that Sony’s PlayStation suite will move to other platforms. SCE CEO Kaz Hirai said:

We have a completely open stance. There are a variety of OSes, but we’re focusing first on Android. There’s also Windows, iOS and so forth, but we don’t have the resources to make it compatible with everything from the start.

This is a fair enough statement, although I question the business decision in aiming first for Android, when it’s clear Sony would make a killing on iOS (despite having to give up 30 per cent of payments to Apple).

Detractors will probably argue that Sony’s ‘open’ stance is an admission that its handheld ambitions (now placing the company resolutely in third place, behind Nintendo and Apple) are failing, but I think this could prove to be a shrewd and brilliant move. At worst, Sony makes a load of cash from reselling old IP, to customers who don’t have a Sony device and don’t feel compelled to buy one. At best, lapsed Sony customers may fall in love with PlayStation games all over again and seek out the current iteration of the company’s consoles. And at the worst end of ‘at worst’, it also sets up Sony to dramatically shift towards a Sega-style software-only position should it need to in the future.

Assuming by ‘open’, Sony does eventually mean ‘Android, iOS, Windows and maybe even Mac’ and not just ‘Android’, there’s nothing here but a huge win for the company.

Hat tip: iPhone Games Bulletin.

The New York Times reports:

The company has told some applications developers, including Sony, that they can no longer sell content, like e-books, within their apps, or let customers have access to purchases they have made outside the App Store.

Apple rejected Sony’s iPhone application, which would have let people buy and read e-books bought from the Sony Reader Store.

This follows news that Apple is to block newspaper apps that enable people to view subscriptions for free through apps, and signals a shift in the way Apple deals with the App Store.

I’ve never had a major problem with the ‘closed’ nature of Apple’s store. Curation is a good thing, and despite the massive amount of crap on the App Store, the quality level certainly beats Android Market and its near-literal ‘anything goes’ model. But recent reports show Apple isn’t willing to give up its cut on anything it could potentially get a cut for.

The New York Times report is particularly worrying if it’s entirely accurate, in that it seems to suggest Apple will go further than it has before, blocking apps that enable access to any purchases made outside of the App Store. This would affect Amazon’s Kindle app and force users to use iBooks, which would hand millions of potential iOS users a damn good reason to seriously consider competing platforms.

My suspicion here is that the New York Times reporters don’t have a full understanding of the facts (and/or the underlying systems in the App Store), but question marks remain. After all, the Kindle system isn’t a million miles away from the newspaper subscription model that Apple is banning. 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.

Update: ZDNet’s interpretation is along the same lines as the positive end of mine, thinking Sony submitted an app with IAPs, and that Kindle’s ‘buy through a browser’ model remains safe.

Update 2: Lex Friedman also thinks the NYT (via Sony) has its facts wrong. Lucky Apple PR’s there to answer our questions, eh?

Oh.

Update 3: Oh dear, Apple, what have you done?