Given the sophistication of modern browsing tools for example on mobile phones, why is there any necessity for "apps" at all, other than to spin money for middlemen? Middlemen in comics, just as in music, are a parasitic drain that impedes the traffic between consumer and creator. It's a payola inspired model and it has the worst aspects of old fashioned ...American... let's say, exploitative capitalism.
To read a digital comic, or any digital work, it isn't much more difficult than to buy it, download it, and open it- often in Adobe because so many "ebooks" are PDF format.
Leaving the format to one side, because it is increasingly irrelevant, the only real concern the larger comicbook players have in relation to digitial delivery seems to be how to screw the most money out of their remaining fans. The recent experiences a few people have described where prematurely released comics were deleted off their reading devices- a clear breach of privacy, an offence under Australian, if not American, law, and so on- shows that it isn't about putting digital versions of comics up for people at a nominal fee. It's about recreating the absurd Diamond / LCS monopoly again for the online era.
Fortunately such dreams of empire seem utterly doomed from the outset, but the fact that so much effort and self-expostulation is devoted to justifying the unjustifiable grab for monopolies indicates where Disney and Warner are focused- capturing and controlling a market and making it impossible for democractic digital to exist. The shills at most comics sites are of course complicit in this.
