You can like Apple and its products or not. We know a lot of people who love Apple and a lot who don’t. It’s a fact that Apple products like iPhone or Mac are widely used. The App Store is a solution for developers to sell their apps worldwide.

The Effort of Developing An Own App

For one year now we offer our iPhone App in the App Store. The development follows strict regulations. The upload process is tough, but in our case everything went well.

The most app providers are small start-ups or freelance developers. Only to develop for the app store a licence is needed every year ($99).  Addiotionally you need a Mac. For each purchase of your app, a fee of 30% has to be paid to Apple.

The Handling of iTunes

is no bed of roses at all. But a lot of developers have complained about this issue already. You get used to it, although it’s frustrating.

Apple Threatens Our Business Model

Although the above mentioned disturbs you, you accept it. You have no other chance. Frankly you earn money with the App Store and if Apple earns money as well, It’s a fair deal. But if Apple attacks our business model, it’s not fun anymore.

What has happened?

As we announced in our previous blogposts we are currently working on an update. The new update contains the most of our user’s wishes. Our business model is Freemium. We wanted to introduce this model to our smartphone apps. We think that a Free version will satisfy a lot of our users. Unfortunately Apple upsets us with vague statements and this delays the development process.

Especially the following paragraph:

11.1 Apps that unlock or enable additional features or functionality

with mechanisms other than the App Store, except as approved in
section 11.13, will be rejected

That means we cannot offer a new app with the freemium model. We don’t want to unsatisfy our users but under these conditions we don’t know if we can continue developing the app.

The following satement makes us hope:

„We created subscriptions for publishing apps, not SaaS apps.“

Unfortunately there is no contact person we could ask and clarify open issues.

Update will be delayed

We apologise for any inconvenience. We keep an eye on the statements from Apple’s site.