I saw James Fritz overview of iPad publishing plugins in InDesign Magazine #43. Great article – but it overlooked one very important and expensive aspect of the current state of iPad app publishing – namely the requirement that the apps be distributed via the App store.
What happens if you want to make iPad apps that don't get distributed via the App store?
Adobe charges a whopping $47,940 ($3,995/month paid 12 months in advance) PER YEAR WITH A 2-YEAR COMMITMENT for the ability to use DPS to make an “Enterprise” app that you can distribute to your salesforce or client base without making it availble on the App store. That's a contract price of $95,880 (plus tax, I assume) – to which all I can say is, on what planet are they expecting to sell this? I can just imagine a company plopping down its first $48,000 and a week later Google announces a free version.
The table in Fritz's article didn't include a category for the cost of Enterprise publishing. Even using the term “Enterprise” for this type of distribution bothers me. I have clients who are nonprofit orgs – schools, AIDS organizations, etc. – that would like to make an iPad app that they can distribute to their fundraising people for use in presentations. I have another client who is an artist who wants to make an app of his work to distribute to potential buyers. Going through the Apple App store just doesn't make sense to this kind of publisher. A lot of the time the information is private or time-sensitive.
Does anybody know whether the plugins covered allow for this type of distribution and if so, how much it costs?
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