I’m afraid there’s going to be a delay to Beetight for iPhone and iPad. I took a phone call from Apple today saying that they’re applying the rules more strictly than they have before, and won’t be allowing any apps that have paid accounts unless there is also the facility to upgrade using Apple’s In-App Purchasing. This basically means that before they’ll allow the app in the store, I have to set up Beetight to support Apple subscriptions as well as PayPal. As you can imagine, this is not a simple task. This is quite aside from the fact that Apple will then be taking 30% of any payments I get. I had quite a long chat with the guy, and there’s basically no way around it. Even if I was to make the app available to all users, whether pro or not, I’d still be in violation, because Pro accounts add extra functionality. I pointed out to him that apps like Spotify have subscriptions that are paid for elsewhere. He essentially told me that they’ll be facing the same rules. There’s a bit more about the changes here.

I won’t do anything initially, but I may end up having to put up prices by a couple of dollars or so to help cover the slice that Apple is taking. I’m not allowed to charge more for payments through them, so it would have to be an increase for every new Pro account. I’ll try to avoid this, and will see how the numbers add up once it’s live, in terms of the percentage of upgrades that are done in the app rather than on the site (where I only pay the PayPal fee, which is far lower). Existing Pro accounts will still be billed at the current prices, so don’t worry there. I’ll give plenty of warning to everyone else before I make any price changes.