Apple this week revised the terms of service for its iTunes software, adding a new feature to send apps as gifts. However, the new feature comes with restrictions that may limit the flexibility of magazine publishers to market their wares as they see fit.
Apple prohibits the gifting of "in-app purchases, in-app subscriptions, [and] upgrades" which means you can't buy someone virtual goods within an iPhone or iPad app. So you won't be able to buy a friend an in-app subscription to Wired magazine for the iPad, for example, like how you can with the print edition.
That news should be a little disappointing for publishers hailing the iPad as the future of magazines, because gift subscriptions have been an effective method to lure in new print subscribers.
We were pleasantly surprised when, last October, Apple informed iPhone developers that they could now build free apps and charge within them to sell an upgrade to the customer. For magazines, that change was significant: Reducing the cost barrier of our business model to zero welcomes users to peruse a sample for free and then commit to a transaction within the app. The ability to gift subscriptions would likely have been a strong epidemic tool for readers to share content with their friends -- and potentially bring in new subscribers as a result.
But alas, while developers now have the ability to "gift" their apps, magazine apps won't have the option to gift subscriptions. And the reason is unknown.
Our iTunes contact has yet to get back to us. And even if our interpretation is correct, it doesn't seem to prevent someone from buying a subscription outright with gift funds.
"This probably does prohibit using the iTunes Store to 'gift' an in-app magazine subscription for a reader app," said Electronic Frontier Foundation senior staff attorney Fred von Lohmann. "But I don't think anything here would stop you from 'gifting' a magazine app from the App Store to someone."
Still, it's difficult not to associate the timing of this change (or clarification, as Apple puts it) to the imminent release of the iPad. There aren't many content apps which already have a subscription model -- Scarab, a small literary journal, comes to mind -- but with advent of the iPad those choosing that model could have increased dramatically.
One possible reason for the change/clarification -- and it's a stretch -- is that Apple doesn't want minors using their iTunes gift certificates to subscribe to racy albeit mainstream content, like Playboy. The other is that Apple doesn't want to allow recurring transactions of which it would otherwise get a cut through iTunes-store fulfillment being conducted offline, as it were.
Could this also be about the in loco parentis tendencies by which Apple has already banned some (but not all) naughty app content? If so, that would also create an impossible task of moderation since periodicals that aren't strictly naughty can contain not "only NSFW-type editorial but ads as well.
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