Andrew Liszewski, reporting for The Verge:

Contrary to prior limitations, there is now a prominent orange “Get book” button on Kindle app’s book listings…

Before today’s updates, buying books wasn’t a feature you’d find in the Kindle mobile app following app store rule changes Apple implemented in 2011 that required developers to remove links or buttons leading to alternate ways to make purchases. You could search for books that offered samples for download, add them to a shopping list, and read titles you already own, but you couldn’t actually buy titles through the Kindle or Amazon app, or even see their prices.

To avoid having to pay Apple’s 30 percent cut of in-app purchases, and the 27 percent tax on alternative payment methods Apple introduced in January 2024, Amazon previously required you to visit and login to its online store through a device’s web browser to purchase ebooks on your iPhone or iPad, which were then synchronized to the app. It was a cumbersome process compared to the streamlined experience of buying ebooks directly on a Kindle e-reader.

Further commentary from Dan Moren at Six Colors:

How long this new normal will last is anyone’s guess, but again, though Apple has already appealed the court’s decision, it’s hard to imagine the company being able to roll this back—the damage, in many ways, is already done and to reverse course would look immensely and transparently hostile to the company’s own customers: “we want your experience to be worse so we get more of the money we think we deserve.” Not a great look.

Just as Moren writes, if Apple really does win on appeal and gets to revert the changes it made last week, there should be riots on the streets of Cupertino. Apple’s primary argument for In-App Purchase, its bespoke system for software payments, is that it’s more secure and less misleading than whatever dark patterns app developers may try to employ, but that argument is moot because developers have always been able to (exclusively) offer physical goods and services via their own payment processors. Uber and Amazon, as preeminent examples, do not use IAP to let users book rides or order products. That doesn’t make them any less secure or more confusing than an app that does use IAP.

No matter how payments are collected, the broad App Store guidelines apply: apps cannot promote scams or steal money from customers. That’s just not allowed in the store, regardless of whether a developer uses IAP or their own payment processor. The processor and business model are separately regulated parts of the app and have been since the dawn of the App Store. That separation should extend to software products, like e-books or subscriptions, too. If an app is promoting a scam subscription or (lowercase) in-app purchase, it should be taken down, not because it didn’t use IAP, but because it’s promoting a scam. I don’t trust Apple with my credit card number any more than I do Amazon.

If Apple reverses course and decides to kill the new Kindle app (among many others) if it wins on appeal, it will probably be the stupidest thing Tim Cook, the company’s chief executive, will ever do. The worst part is that I wouldn’t even put it past him. Per the judge’s ruling last week, Cook took the advice of a liar who’s about to be sent to prison for lying under oath and Luca Maestri, his chief financial officer, over Phil Schiller, the company’s decades-long marketing chief and protégé of Steve Jobs. Schiller is as smart an Apple executive as they come — he’s staunchly pro-30 percent fee and anti-Epic Games, but he follows the law. He knows when something would go too far, and he’s always aware of Apple’s brand reputation.

When Cook threw the Mac into the garbage can just before the transition to Apple silicon, Schiller invited a group of Mac reporters to all but state outright that Pro Macs would come. The Mac Pros were burning up, the MacBook Pros had terrible keyboards, and all of the iMacs were consumer-grade, yet Schiller successfully convinced those reporters that new Pro Macs would exist and that the Mac wasn’t forgotten about. Schiller is the last remaining vestige of Jobs-era Apple left at the company, and it’s so disheartening to hear that Cook decided to trust his loser finance people instead of someone with a genuine appreciation and respect for the company’s loyal users.

All of this is to say that Cook ought to get his head examined, and until that’s done, I have more confidence in the legal system upholding what I believe was a rightful ruling than Apple doing what’s best for its users. It’s a sad state of affairs down there in Cupertino.