Why Amazon may not care about in-app purchase
In all this furor about the App Store and in-app purchases, we have not heard a peep from Amazon, the 800-pound gorilla of external content. (TUAW long since contacted Amazon for a statement, and like everyone else, never heard anything back). Chuck Toporek of Addison Wesley/Pearson has a particularly insightful post up on his personal blog explaining why this may be so.
Amazon's Kindle for the Web has been in beta since September 2010, offering a potential web-based alternative to a native iOS app. Toporek writes that in his tests, Kindle for the Web worked beautifully for desktop and iPad, while the iPhone "takes a little extra work, but it can be done." Being in beta, full book texts are not yet available, but if Amazon wishes to leave the App Store, it has a fully realized solution that it can move to that is already deployed and being tested.
Perhaps more content-dependent developers will be returning to Steve Jobs' original "sweet solution" of Web-based applications as the IAP drama plays out and HTML 5 continues to mature. The best way to deal with an unaccommodating Apple App Store may be to sidestep the store entirely.
