With Kickstarter gaining steam, partly thanks to the enormous success of Tim Schafer’s adventure game, prospective Kickstarters have wondered how certain projects are handling distribution on closed platforms, such as Apple’s iOS. The company only gives out a limited number of promo copies and on top of that, a forced password gate for ‘free’ apps isn’t allowed as such an approach would evade Apple’s royalty cuts.

It turns out there is a workaround however, one that Apple seems to currently approve of, but you’ll have to ask them first. The developers of Zombies, Run! came up with the solution of releasing a paid and free app, the latter containing some introductory content with an optional authentication mechanism to unlock the full version. Basically the same as a password gate, but since the free app contained some content and the unlock was entirely optional, Apple gave it the go ahead.

It’s not a clear-cut solution as the developers Zombies, Run! point out. The policy could certainly change in the future and anyone interested in going this route should contact Apple first. At any rate, it’s nice to hear that Apple is giving some leeway to these Kickstarter projects. Apple may lose out on the initial round of sales, but ultimately it benefits them once the app is officially released. It will be interesting to see how bigger projects, like the recently funded Republique approach this.

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