On middlemen and content

John Gruber, on the new subscription rules for the App Store:

And who exactly can’t afford a 70/30 split? Middlemen. It’s not that Apple is opposed to middlemen — it’s that Apple wants to be the middleman. It’s difficult to expect them to be sympathetic to the plights of other middlemen.

I think part of the issue at play is the distinction between selling an app and selling content. Apple’s policy doesn’t seem so harsh when we consider it applying to content sales: it may drive middlemen out of the equation, but the consumer doesn’t lose out as long as the content authors can sell directly. 

What about someone whose business model is to write an app (and sell it for a one off payment) for someone else’s service? Writing iPhone clients for web services is a great way for a small developer to make a useful product, and it’s good for consumers to have a choice of multiple apps: that way there’s some innovation in the software design. But what if Apple deems the web service you’re consuming to be content rather than software? Suddenly there is no way to write that app. Suddenly we’re down to only one app per web service: the official one. Apple have intrinsically tied the software innovator to the content rightsholder, and I’m not convinced that’s the way to get good software.

For which categories of app is this an issue? I don’t know yet. Apple has supposedly said that software-as-a-service is exempt from the rules, so it depends where they draw the line at what they call content. 

Regarding the plights of other middlemen, I do expect Apple to be sympathetic when the middleman under consideration is adding value by writing good software. If a developer is scared to write a client for a service that costs money, because Apple require them to re-sell that service through their app (which they’re not allowed to do), that’s bad. It may not be bad for Apple, it may not be bad for the iPhone’s marketshare, but it’s bad for me as a user and as a developer.