Because doing an app well is hard. It's much much easier to wait until someone like Kicksend establish themselves, then give them some money and have them integrate.

And then there's the marketing: Walgreens would peddle the app to people who are in the store and thinking about printing digital photos. A Kicksend user might never set foot in Walgreens, but if he knows about the feature in the app (it's pretty discoverable), he might decide to print a few photos to stick on the empty wall next to his desk.

I believe this has almost nothing to do with servers and upload time etc.

People, naturally, don't tend to download some app to print their photos. In fact, people are not inclined to print photos. So there's an app which people actually use every day, it partners with a service provider to sell a service and get commission out of it.

There are examples like Song Pop game gives you to opportunity buy the music you guessed from iTunes. There's an affiliate problem of iTunes for that. Because Apple (iTunes) itself won't be implementing a game to increase sales.

Here, the point is, people won't print their photos every day. But people will take photos every day. So if I would download Walgreen app and can't find anything to print at a moment, I'll forget to use and print it when I take a picture with Instagram. So if I would see a print button integrated in Instagram, it will dramatically increase sales.

And if the payments come straight out of your apple ID account that would be fantastic.

They would also cost 30% more.

that's not how percentages work. If Apple takes a 30% cut of your price, then you have to raise your price by 42.8% to still make the same amount of money.

Ah, but if you offered the same service to Android users you couldn't do that, because you aren't allowed to price things differently between iOS and other purchasing options. Unless that has changed.

I believe there's no restriction on pricing on different platforms. If mostly wealthy people have iOS devices, then I might set app price to a higher value than Android just to encourage purchases on Android. I think no one will ever care.

This is actually based on an iOS and Android SDK that Walgreens created, allowing any photo app to integrate with photo printing.

http://news.walgreens.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=561...