[Macworld]

Post your comments for Epocrates brings premium app to iPhone here

[nmpike]

Isn't this a violation of "All purchases for iPhone apps must go through the App Store exclusively?"
If this is no longer a barrier, we have an app we'd like to sell off of our website and let iPhone users use it for a yearly fee.

[silver99]

As far as I know this doesn't violate any App Store agreements because as a developer you have 2 paths. The cheaper one is to sign up to develop for the iTunes App Store. The other (more expensive) is to develop apps that you would distribute and sell on your own. It looks like Epocrates has done the latter.

[vinnie_A]

I find the free version to be rather sluggish compared to how it ran on my Palm. Just launching takes about 6 seconds on the iPhone and adding drugs to the list for interaction checking isn't exactly speedy either. This doesn't sound like much, but in a practice where you see 50 patients a day, it adds up. It is functional, but could be better.

[backtomacintosh]

I like the free epocrates app quite nice. It may be a tad on the sluggish side but I still find it useful and use it daily.
The price of the premium service however is exorbitant IMO. Not interested.

[drbenru]

They're pretty smart in their approach. The app will continue to be free in the app store. The app is a content viewer. The app conects to epocrates server for updates, as all the data has to be kept up to date. Each app has to have a registered login name and password to connect to the epocrates servers. The premium content is attached to your login name, if you have free login, the drug info is all you get, if you have a premium account they include the additional data, and the presence of the data enables the extra features in the app.

In a way they're circumventing the app store. We'd have to see what apple does.