You cant buy kindle books via the amazon app for exactly this reason. You can only download a sample. If you open the website in a browser though, you can.
This a bit silly since there are no in-app purchases to circumvent. It's more of Apple forbidding you to say in app "oh yeah, I'm also selling stuff, not here though". I think such restriction should be illegal clause because of customer or competition laws or sth. They aren't since Apple has them, but should be. Regulators should descend on platform owners and force them to share. Like they are forcing telecoms to sell services in bulk to virtual operators.
As a counterpoint, if Apple relaxed this rule, then app store revenue would plummet. Everyone would make their app free and virtually non-functional, then sell subscriptions via in-app links that direct the purchase to their own fulfillment service. Nobody's entitled to a business model, but I think it's useful to take this devil's advocate view.
Regulators know exactly what Apple is doing here, and have so far declined to take action. That's an explicit decision, not an oversight.
ahh it all makes sense now...so that's why I have to go to the web to buy stuff in Fandango/Vudu.
How come these companies don't do something similar for subscriptions? ex: HBO Now (or whatever the fuck it's called these days) could have a subscribe button that takes you out of the app to their site - completely circumventing the in-app subscription purchase. Right?
Apple will ban them if they do that. You're not allowed to link to or even mention alternative payment methods. You can't even point out that the price is 43% higher to cover Apple's cut.
Because apps can’t link to purchase outside the App Store. Let alone link, they can’t even mention they can purchase the content elsewhere either with images, text or any form.
I think this is so silly on Apple side as they try to have a name on raising the bar for user experience. And the worse is that before I realized what was going on I thought it was Amazon fault for some reason, which is even better for Apple as people would normally blame the developers rather than the platform for this design decision.