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Are there any examples of selling iPhone apps - other than weekly magazines and the like - using a subscription model instead of a one-time app store purchase?

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I would imagine the king of this model at the moment is Gameloft's Order & Chaos Online. It's basically a World of Warcraft MMO clone that has a 99 cent monthly subscription fee in addition to the initial purchase cost.

Here's an article on TouchArcade about how they supposedly raked in a cool million in the first 20 days.

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Thank you. That's exactly the kind of thing I was looking for. They treat the subscription as just another in-app purchase which surprised me. I wonder how apple feels about this model in general. – Kevin Lawrence Sep 8 '11 at 0:53
Glad it helped! I know there was some conflict a while back, revolving around the magazine-type apps, where Apple wasn't happy with companies handling subscriptions outside of their environment (since they couldn't get their cut...). Not sure how it ended up, but I imagine they now explicitly require subscriptions and the like to be handled as an in-app purchase. It will be interesting to see how this all pans out in the future, as a lot of digital retailers seem to be implementing similar requirements for publishers/developers. – Alex Sep 8 '11 at 2:24
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Here is a great on by Elia Freedmon on his lessons learned with releasing an app into the app store -

http://eliainsider.com/2009/04/15/lessons-learned-one-month-in-the-iphone-appstore

It is pretty in depth and insightful.

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