Amazon Prime is new today and most significant partner. To be clear, Apple says this an an established program.
But it was completely new news to me and also to longtime Apple reporter Mark Gurman, who definitely would have remembered such a thing!
AMAZON APPSTORE DEVELOPER TV
On qualifying premium video entertainment apps such as Prime Video, Altice One and Canal+, customers have the option to buy or rent movies and TV shows using the payment method tied to their existing video subscription.įirstly, I just want to point out that Apple calls this an “established program,” one that already applied to those smaller cable companies. (An Amazon spokesperson confirmed the change and some of the features without giving a formal comment.)Īpple has an established program for premium subscription video entertainment providers to offer a variety of customer benefits - including integration with the Apple TV app, AirPlay 2 support, tvOS apps, universal search, Siri support and, where applicable, single or zero sign-on. You may have read it already, but there’s enough detail in the wording to give us a fuller picture of what’s really going on. I think it’s interesting in its own right, but I also think it’s important context for the real question: what does this mean for everybody else in the App Store ecosystem? (I’ll disclose here that my wife works for Oculus on its app store, but I recuse myself from reporting on it so I have literally no idea what Oculus’ policies are.)Īpple provided us with a statement about the change.
I want to get into some of the details here - much of which is based more on reasonable assumption than confirmed information (see the note about transparency above). By subscribing, you are agreeing to receive a daily newsletter from The Verge that highlights top stories of the day, as well as occasional messages from sponsors and / or partners of The Verge.