Apple is saying that developers are not allowed. It's mandatory to offer subscriptions from within the app if you have subscription ability outside the app. You cannot link to the outside subscription method from the app and you have to charge the same amount or less for in-app subscriptions than you do for outside ones.

So I'll use my example again. What if a company has a subscription model it's been using for years, including a customer base that it's had for years with a service that's primarily consumed outside the app store - whatever it may be. Now let's say that company wants to create an app specifically for its subscribers, for whatever reason and to do whatever it happens to do - that's not important.

By Apple's rules, that app would have to allow subscribing from within it and it and Apple would take 30% of the subscription price. It doesn't matter that the app may only be for feature "Y" of the company's offering which offers features A through Z. They're going to get raped for 30% regardless.

I already thought 30% was way too high for app sales to begin with, but this is simply ridiculous.

You'll probably read "make it up in volume" tossed around a lot. Maybe by people who don't know that anything multiplied by 0 is still zero. Or that when you multiply a loss you only get a bigger loss. The folks making a huge play in volume with guaranteed points on every sale are Apple. They have the volume of the entire store, of every developer working for them, taking a neat 30% of everything. Those are some huge dollars.

You can argue of course that Apple hosts the apps and even hosts in-app purchases. But they're not going to host subscribed content for the most part. They certainly aren't going to cover the bill for the servers required to run someone else's music streaming company. But they still want 30%. For nothing.

If they want to take 30% they should be providing the infrastructure to run the back end of the business supplying the content. So they should host all the data and provide the connections and bandwidth to all the users. That would allow a music streaming company for instance to have pretty much zero overhead. The thing is, they still might not be able to afford to pay Apple 30% if their cut from the music isn't 30% to begin with.