苹果应用的霸主地位面临挑战

Big deadline for app publishers. Some people worry we might not be able to find some of our favorite apps online. Kindle is one of those in the front line. What's happening?

That's right. Well, back in February, Apple said that they were going to try to wrap all purchases in apps through Apple's own internet purchasing system, in which Apple takes 30% of the top.

So everything has to happen in the App Store now, you can't go outside. Let's look at Kindle. So if we were looking on here, what are we talking about. These are the book should normally see, this is the issue that Apple has—Shop In Kindle Store.

That's right. That's right. When you press this button on your iPad, it boots you out to web app and you can buy a book through amazon.com. (Right.) And obviously, that would cut Apple out of the revenue stream, which they don't want.

So Apply is saying, get rid of that, or you gonna be out of our app world. So, so far no change on the Kindle site today if you are on. But that may not be the case. We don't really know. We haven't heard anything, right?

That's right. Experts are saying maybe this wasn't really a hard-and-fast deadline, but it's definitely something we gonna be looking at in the next couple of weeks.

So, **. Let's know some sites though have changed a little bit, Hulu, which is available here in the US with basically something you could buy, download your favorite shows or episodes on. (That’s right.) What's happened when we go there?

As you can see, it’s just a straight login screen. And what it used to have before last week was—not a subscriber, click here to access huluplus and it was hulu.com/plus. Now they removed that, the same compliance.

So you have to be a subscriber and you get all has to happen in the App Store. Now in some cases, some companies have already taken preemptive action like FT. How is it working? It's a web app?

That's right. It's via HTML5, and this allows companies to design only for the web. So, you can download the app through web, no problem.

You don't have to go to an App Store, whether it's Apple or Android or anything.

So it cuts out the middle man basically. You are not giving 30% of the top to Apple. You are not....whether it's Google or Nokia...

You don't have to make different tailer, you can just do it. Now this seems to be... In Apple's case, cut out the middle man, they don't have to give up 30% of the revenue. They don't have to make all these different versions for Android. This will seem like something that a lot of companies would want to do. Does this mean we are going to see a mass defection away from the app world, from App Stores?

I think you could see that with big names like FT.com. But it's tougher for the smaller developers. They are not someone like Amazon who can say, you know, we are big enough that we can go, do our own thing. For those smaller developers, who no one has heard of, it's going to be tougher for them to sort of defect to the web, do their own thing and hope that people find them just by searching.