Amazon introduced a Cloud Reader for the Kindle, and the Financial Times pulled their iPhone app out of Apple's store and introduced an HTML5 web application. All of these moves point to the fact that companies are finding Apple's 30% fees for revenue to be a bit onerous and want to find a way to reduce their costs. That makes sense, and my suspicion is that Apple will ease their terms at some point as companies move to their own web model of building and deploying applications instead of building native iOS apps.

I don't think the AppStore model is dying, however. One of the things that I have noticed in the apps between the iPhone and the Android devices at the ranch is that the quality of the iOS apps is higher. It's rare that I have crashes, there is more consistency between the various interfaces, things work as you expect, and they run well. It's not that Android apps are horrible, but outside of the large company apps, the quality of any particular app is likely to be lower. That's expected because there is no gate that prevents someone from building a poor quality app and deploying it in the Android marketplace.

Read the rest of "A Better Application Model" at SQLServerCentral.