Adobe Makes Dramatic Change to iOS App Publishing Program

Adobe has been running a fairly popular service for the last few years that has been marketed towards independent authors, businesses and design studios to create enhanced eBook apps for iOS. Adobe has just confirmed that starting in May 2015, these companies will either have to find other options  to publish apps, or pay thousands of dollars a month.

The Digital Publishing Suite, Single Edition puts iPad app design within reach of anyone with InDesign skills, providing an intuitive way to create unlimited apps for the iPad without writing code. This service was free to Adobe Creative Cloud members. The essence of the program was to provide an avenue to develop enhanced eBooks, cookbooks, magazines and other content using the EPUB3 framework and packaging them as dedicated apps to be sold in the Apple Newsstand or the App Store.

This move to suspend the program was not received well by a number of small business that have started to use it for their app-development pipeline. Joseph T. Sinclair said “Adobe has a complete disregard for small-time digital publishing and authors and can no longer be trusted. It’s a shame, because Adobe has been one of the best software companies in the world all these years and was thought to be a booster of digital publishing. But I will advise everyone to find a new authoring system for book apps, which I believe are the future of digital publishing. And who will needs CC to make EPUBs? It won’t be long before you can make EPUB 3 ebooks with a wide variety of authoring software. “

Jason commented on the official Adobe Blog, lamenting “I just upgraded my entire design team for our non-profit org to Adobe CC, with a primary purpose being the use of DPS. We just published our first app to the app store and was planning to start scaling that up to one of our larger publications and now you’re pulling the functionality. EPUB is not a viable alternative. I purchased to publish to the app store, not to iBooks where the publication is hidden away in an app that very few users even use.”

Adobe has confirmed that if companies still want to create apps using their Digital Publishing Suite that they have to signup for an Enterprise Account. This is a costly endeavor as each license costs $2,875 a month. I doubt many can afford that, as the previous cost to publish apps to Apple was $49.99 per month or $19.99 to publish a single app.