You cant buy kindle books via the amazon app for exactly this reason. You can only download a sample. If you open the website in a browser though, you can.

And if I recall correctly, they can't even tell you that it is possible to purchase books outside of the app. Which I find ridiculous.

Apple explicitly disallows telling people how to circumvent in-app purchases. It will get your app taken down.

This a bit silly since there are no in-app purchases to circumvent. It's more of Apple forbidding you to say in app "oh yeah, I'm also selling stuff, not here though". I think such restriction should be illegal clause because of customer or competition laws or sth. They aren't since Apple has them, but should be. Regulators should descend on platform owners and force them to share. Like they are forcing telecoms to sell services in bulk to virtual operators.

As a counterpoint, if Apple relaxed this rule, then app store revenue would plummet. Everyone would make their app free and virtually non-functional, then sell subscriptions via in-app links that direct the purchase to their own fulfillment service. Nobody's entitled to a business model, but I think it's useful to take this devil's advocate view.

Regulators know exactly what Apple is doing here, and have so far declined to take action. That's an explicit decision, not an oversight.

Sure. They but now they can explicitly decide the other way around?

Judges question "Why 30% exactly?" indicates that people no longer think Apple is entitled to that.

ahh it all makes sense now...so that's why I have to go to the web to buy stuff in Fandango/Vudu.

How come these companies don't do something similar for subscriptions? ex: HBO Now (or whatever the fuck it's called these days) could have a subscribe button that takes you out of the app to their site - completely circumventing the in-app subscription purchase. Right?

Apple will ban them if they do that. You're not allowed to link to or even mention alternative payment methods. You can't even point out that the price is 43% higher to cover Apple's cut.

Because apps can’t link to purchase outside the App Store. Let alone link, they can’t even mention they can purchase the content elsewhere either with images, text or any form.

I think this is so silly on Apple side as they try to have a name on raising the bar for user experience. And the worse is that before I realized what was going on I thought it was Amazon fault for some reason, which is even better for Apple as people would normally blame the developers rather than the platform for this design decision.

They don't allow Kindle purchases in the Amazon app on iOS, maybe this is why?

See: https://www.amazon.ca/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=G...

it definitely does for audiobooks, hence you can't buy audiobooks through the app.

Unless you buy Audiobooks from the iTunes Audiobooks store, of course - and Apple doesn't have to pay a 30% tax to itself for those sales.

How is this not monopoly abuse?

As of recently, you can spend credits within the app and purchase audiobooks.

are you sure? It doesn't work for me (UK-based)

With Audible monthly subscription you get credits each month to use to acquire access to audiobooks. You can now spend those credits in the Audible app. This isn’t much different from some games. For Roblox, you can purchase Robux on the website and then use them in the iOS app, though in this instance they offer IAP for Robux in the app as well.