Web app

Reuters is reporting that the Financial Time’s web app is more popular than their recently Apple-removed iOS app. You’ll recall that the Financial Times’ iOS app was removed by Apple, due to the publication trying to dodge Apple’s 30% cut regulation. Luckily for Financial Times, they’re not seeing any issues in traffic, getting more than 700,000 users on their newly launched web app. Financial Times is simply drawing in users by displaying a message at the top of their site, linking to their HTML 5 app.

So this draws the question — do publishers really need to have an iOS app on the Store? Maybe not.

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The Financial Times has officially been removed from the App Store after failing to comply with Apple’s in-app subscription model that requires payments to be processed through iTunes (giving Apple a 30% cut in the process).

The publication used to have an iPhone and iPad app, which appear to have been removed from the App Store today. Fortunately for FT (not so much for Apple), they also have an HTML5 web app alternative that they’re urging iOS users to use instead.

The Financial Times told Paid Content:
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As a part of Apple’s MobileMe-to-iCloud transition, Apple will be bringing expired MobileMe accounts back to life. We have gotten our hands on login information for a long-expired MobileMe account and have discovered that Apple has already migrated these accounts over to the free iCloud service (shown above). In order to setup these newly resurrected accounts you need to be running Apple’s upcoming iOS 5 and OS X Lion (with iCloud beta installed). Your old MobileMe username and password will now function as your iCloud Apple ID.

The reason being is that these new iCloud e-mail, calendar, and other accounts no longer work at me.com. That’s right, for the time being, users who have their old MobileMe accounts migrated over to the iCloud service can no longer access their email on the web. We got our expired test MobileMe account up and running as an iCloud account on a Mac running OS X Lion (with iCloud installed) and an iPhone running iOS 5. Mail, contacts, calendar, and the rest of the suite work perfectly with native apps, but not in Apple’s me.com web apps. Find my iPhone is the exception.

There has been a lot of talk lately over whether or not iCloud will support the MobileMe web apps, usher in their own redesigned web apps, or leave the web in the dark. Our discovery points to no web app compatibility, but that is likely because the iCloud web apps do not exist yet. The Loop and others say that iCloud web apps are, in fact, in development. We’ll likely see those when iCloud is ready to launch this fall. Thanks, Kristian!

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