As an enormous ecosystem swelled around it, crystalline structures of new rules and avenues of customer interaction have also grown — but not nearly fast enough for most developers. Especially the “long tail” of independent app makers which account for the most vociferous and loyal segment, if not the majority of downloads.
Then last week, Apple made three big announcements about changes to the App Store. It would bring search ads to the store, make review times much faster for developers and allow any category of app to use subscriptions — paying those developers an additional share of the revenue if people stayed subscribed more than a year.
