Pulse iPad App Gets Steve Jobs's Praise in Morning...Then Booted From App Store Hours Later After NYT Complains
Yesterday morning, the pair of Stanford University graduate students who made the hot news-reading iPad app, Pulse News Reader, were ecstatic to be mentioned first-for being among …
Context & Ripple Effects
Pulse’s removal puts Apple between a prominent iPad publisher and a Stanford-built news-reading app that had won praise from Steve Jobs. The immediate conflict is documented in the Times’ objection to the news-reader app, rather than being a product-quality dispute.
The episode also sharpens the tension around the iPad’s news strategy following earlier coverage of Steve Jobs’s New York Times disappointment: publisher relationships and App Store distribution are becoming intertwined.
First-order effects
- Pulse loses its App Store route to iPad users after Apple acted on the New York Times complaint.
- The New York Times gains an immediate check on an app presenting its reporting in a third-party news-reading format.
Second-order effects
- Other iPad news-reader developers must account for both publishers’ objections and Apple’s enforcement decisions when designing products around publisher content.
- Apple’s role as App Store gatekeeper becomes a practical source of leverage for publishers seeking control over how their work reaches iPad readers.
Third-order effects
- If publishers use platform complaints to police third-party readers, the iPad news market may favor licensed distribution arrangements over independent aggregation interfaces.
- The dispute points to a broader contest over whether device platforms, publishers, or reader apps set the terms of digital news presentation.
The trend: Early iPad news distribution is becoming a three-way negotiation among publishers protecting presentation rights, apps building reader interfaces, and Apple controlling access to the platform.