Amazon's 'Kindle' App Updated to Remove Direct Kindle Store Links [Updated: Nook]
Following reports that The Wall Street Journal and eBook company Kobo have pulled direct content sales from their iOS apps in order to comply with Apple's new rules regarding in-app subscriptions and purchases, Amazon has followed suit with an update to its Kindle app for iOS.
What's new
- This update removes the Kindle Store button from the app.
While the Kindle app has always redirected users to a Safari web app for purchasing, it has until now prominently featured a button to allow users to quickly navigate to the store from the app. Users will now have to manually load the store in Safari when they wish to purchase new content.
Kindle app before (left) and after (right) update
Amazon has attempted to soften the blow of the new inconvenience for getting to the Kindle Store by enhancing support for newspapers and magazines on the iOS app. Users can now read over 100 newspapers and magazines through the app after subscribing via the Kindle Store website. Kindle users who are already subscribed to newspapers and magazines can now quickly access the content on their iOS devices via the "Archived Items" section.
Given the number of apps that have been updated or removed to address Apple's in-app subscription and purchases policy, it certainly appears that Apple has finally closed the door and begun enforcing the new rules that were to have gone into effect on June 30th.
Update: Barnes & Noble's NOOK app has also seen its "Shop" button removed in an update today.
You can read any NOOK Book you have purchased on this updated NOOK for iPhone app, however the Shop link has been removed so to buy NOOK Books from your iPhone, open your Safari browser and go to nookbooks.com.
Popular Stories
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
The upcoming iOS 17.5 update for the iPhone includes only a few new user-facing features, but hidden code changes reveal some additional possibilities. Below, we have recapped everything new in the iOS 17.5 and iPadOS 17.5 beta so far. Web Distribution Starting with the second beta of iOS 17.5, eligible developers are able to distribute their iOS apps to iPhone users located in the EU...
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Top Rated Comments
Just another dickish move... nothing surprising really.
Not this trite again. IAP is an optional service, a payment processor. Amazon has their own payment processing infrastructure.
The "rent" is the 99$/year developer fees and the 30% of the app price itself.
Can we drop the "rent" thing ? Apple wouldn't have sold those 200 million iOS devices with Safari alone, it's things like Kindle, the iOS games, Google apps, Netflix and others that make them worthwhile. It works both ways, as such, developers owe nothing to Apple beyond the 99$/year and 30% of the app's price. Apple has no grounds to force IAP/IAS on 3rd parties that don't require such a payment processing service.
I plan on holding on to the version that I have, with the button...
Because Apple don't want their customers to have this experience: "Wow! This is so much easier on Android!" :)