Eli Hodapp from Touch Arcade reacting to Apple’s decision to end the affiliate program:

TouchArcade has been around since early 2008, with our very first post published on March 12th, 2008 surrounding the earliest iPhone developers committing to making games on the platform. Since then, it has been a rollercoaster. In the early days, we had loads of good times. Recently? It genuinely feels like Apple does not want us to exist anymore.

I don’t know how the takeaway from this move can be seen as anything other than Apple extending a massive middle finger to sites like TouchArcade, AppShopper, and many others who have spent the last decade evangelizing the App Store and iOS gaming- Particularly on the same day they announced record breaking earnings of $53.3 billion and a net quarterly profit of $11.5 billion.

I think it would be a huge loss for the like of Touch Arcade to be forced to shut down or scale back because of this decision from Apple. It may be the case that Apple are losing a percentage of revenue from paying out to those registered in the affiliate program, but that is surely a tiny figure to a company that have just been valued at a trillion US dollars on the market.

Personally, I have used websites like Touch Arcade and Appspy countless times to find apps and games that would be of interest to me. Regardless of what changes are made to the App Store editorial section, it will never replace the value of those sites.