Amazon released an ad showing how easy it was to move books between iOS and Android.
Apple didn't like this ad, so revoked the original exception.
Amazon removed the ability to purchase books from the Kindle app.
End result – experience is shittier for all users, but Apple gets a fraction of a percent more platform lock-in.
If you have any business understanding that you should understand that no business is a charity: neither Amazon nor Apple. Any money left on the table is just free money for the shareholders of another company.
They made the point that Apple devices were more popular than Kindle, implying that Amazon was basically using Apple devices for lead-gen for book sales without paying Apple their cut. Their original deal was that Kindle was supposed to be a device where you bought the books, and you could just read them through the phone app as a convenience. Since the primary use case shifted they began enforcing that fee.
This seems to be a consistent app store policy, however it's been spun over the years.
So I assume that you’re an investor in $AAPL, and not a user of Apple products?
Nobody is arguing that these lock-in moves won’t make them money, but that their greed does harm the user experience - the result being that you can’t buy Kindle books on iPhone now (and countless other such examples).
It’s up to Apple to improve their own user experience, or suffer the lack of sales otherwise. It’s nonsensical that the government should step in to improve the user experience for private products… especially to the benefit of a third party private company.
Framing “you can’t buy Kindle books on iOS” as Apple’s fault is spinning it because you can also say it’s Amazon’s fault for reducing their user experience by refusing to pay Apple’s platform fees.
Sure, making Apple products all free would be great for user experience, but is not only non-sustainable but non-sensical business practice.
Apple's deal was made only because Amazon claimed that their books were purchased on Kindle and that they wouldn't advertise other platforms. As soon as they broke that part of the agreement, Apple was not going to continue to appease them.
It was allowed under the old rules, then the rules changed, then the Amazon ad these emails were referencing game out. So at the point of these email the Kindle app was out of compliance with the App Store rules, but Apple was allowing it as an exception because they viewed it as a promotion of Apple products. This ad changed their view and now though that the Kindle app on iOS was a promotion of how easy it was to move to Android.
I don't read it that way (most of your post I agree with though). I think the point was that before this email, Kindle devices had their own customers, and Apple wanted Kindle as a feature on their products to increase the appeal of iphone/ipad. But eventually those customers started doing all their "kindling" on their apple devices, so now from apple's perspective they think "we are providing you customers/making you a market, pay us". This is what the whole second paragraph is about.
[1] The exception has been certain large companies that they viewed as strategic on the platform (at least for a time.) As soon as they weren't viewed as strategic, the rules tended to change.
Schiller then brings up how there's a complementary ad in which an Android user buys books, then reads them on iOS. Jobs' point would make sense if that was the original example, but it wasn't brought up until after he'd responded. Weird. Maybe he was psychic? (j/k)
Another thing that doesn't make sense is Schiller's recommendation to ask Amazon to "get in compliance with the rules". It sounds like they were in compliance with the rules, because an exception had been made for them. It seems (from those emails only) like the issue was that Apple made an exception for Amazon they no longer wanted to abide by.