It’s going on now, Engadget is live blogging.
Good stuff. I posted in the Game Room about EA developing Spore (they did a demo), and now AOL is presenting AIM for the iPhone.
I don’t even HAVE an iPhone, and I can tell this is going to be big.
Developers can pick the price they want to distribute their applications for. They get 70% and Apple takes its cut of 30% to host the apps and maintain the store. Developers can choose to release their stuff for free, and Apple won’t charge anyone anything.
The software update goes out to all iPhone users in June.
All the same stuff will work on the Touch, but someone (unclear who, my guess is the user) will have to pay more.
Yeah, I think it has something to do with Sarbanes-Oxley accounting laws. They can’t add new features to a product you already bought and they have recorded the revenue for. They can do it with the iPhone because they record the revenue on a subscription model. That’s my limited understanding of it, anyway. Cite.
I’m unclear as to why this is a big deal. All other smart phones can have apps installed on them. The iPhone was the only phone that was locked. Now they’ve unlocked it, but they still take a 30% cut off the top? That’s not good news. It’s a kick in the balls to their customers if you ask me. You can get AIM on the iPhone now? Big freaking whoop. Other smart phones have come pre-installed with AIM, Yahoo!, and MSN messengers for a while now.
I was unclear on this from the press notes: is the unnamed fee for the ability to purchase applications, or for upgrading to the enterprise edition? A fee for enterprise support seems a lot more reasonable than for the ability to purchase more stuff from Apple.
It’s for anything significantly new that they are adding to existing, already-purchased products – including the enterprise features. It’s pretty dumb, but it’s the SOX act that forces them to charge fair market value for the preceived value of the features they are adding to a device that is not administered by a subscription-based revenue stream, ostensibly to force more transparent accounting. It’s a load of bollocks if you ask me – a great deal of SOX is – but that’s supposedly what’s forcing Apple’s hand. I don’t know if they are truly required to do so or if they’re just not interpreting the law correctly, but there it is anyway.