Slippery slopes

Good response by Marco Arment to my counterargument to his post about auto-renewal subscriptions and iOS technologies Apple doesn’t open up to developers (or at least the majority of them). I particularly like his proposed solution for Newsstand Kit’s push notification applied to other apps:

Newsstand Kit’s background-wakeup push notification can only fire once a day, and background NKAssetDownloads only work if the device is on Wi-Fi and has a healthy battery charge. So give all apps the ability to receive that background-wakeup push notification once a day, as long as the user has granted them permission to use push notifications. Then let them update or download whatever they can do in the 10 minutes that they’re allowed to run in the background. And if the system decides to terminate them during those 10 minutes for any reason, that’s fine, too.

Even without NKAssetDownloads, and even if Wi-Fi was required, this would be a huge benefit. Unlimited-time NKAssetDownloads are only required by magazines because so many of them are ridiculously bloated at hundreds of megabytes per issue, but a huge class of apps could download everything they need in a few hundred kilobytes over a few minutes, at most.

I still think auto-renewable subscriptions should be limited to a specific set of apps (and Apple must be clear about that – enough with the unwritten rules), but I have to say I’m intrigued by the idea of smaller lightweight downloads now.