Now A No-Evil Zone
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I don't want another device I have to understand to the core in order to avoid viruses, trojan apps, and other mundane problems.
I want a damn phone that runs a few apps. I like that I can outsource most of my worries to Apple, and let them worry about it, and the price is that I don't have root.
I wonder how we can make both sides happy: both my side of "I know what I'm doing, but I don't want to do it.", and "It's my toy, let me do what I want". I see the merits of both, but I worry even about putting a "unlock me please" button in the settings panes somewhere, since it will end up with phones trojaned, dialing 1-900 numbers so the owner could have a cute animated cat on their unlock screen.
Consider the browser I'm using right now: Chrome. I don't understand how V8 or Webkit works, but my experience on Chrome isn't complicated, nor is it necessary that I understand these components. However, should I choose, I can educate myself and take control of my browser.
Don't get me wrong, I understand the appeal of an open system to us techies, but I like that I never have to worry, or manage the system myself. I do enough of it already.
This view of the phone as an appliance is not accurate any more. Whether or not the public realizes it, they're holding a computing device. In 5 years time, I expect one to be able to use their phone with an external monitor and keyboard and use it much like you would a Netbook today.
So where does that leave us? We're headed towards a highly portable and compact computing device, that is currently a transitory species (if you will). I think this is an exciting time for computing. This is a bold challenge! How do you provide something that is safe by default, simple to use, and doesn't encumber the tinkerers that have been proven to time and again generate wonderful arenas of opportunity, wealth and societal change?
Personally, I think a sort of middle solution is best. An opt-in for tinkering, perhaps. I think closing tinkering is just plain foolish. It's proven to be valuable and shouldn't be stopped.
But that last point is what I'm worried about. Windows is opt-in now sorta, but it still gets malware. The Android appstore has already let financial related trojans into it.
So figuring out the balance is hard if you account for people willing to click "yes" to anything. I do in fact like the idea of an open system, but I want people to explain why I should also be required to be as defensive about my phone as I am with my Windows computer. (viruses, latest updates, dangerous applications).
Honestly, I'm not arguing that walled gardens are the best thing ever, I'm arguing that there are advantages that get ignored in the "OMG, it's my device" arguments. I want a nice middleground, and not another device that's totally open, and total a pain in the ass to manage and defend.
The problem Outlook had a few years ago was exactly the opposite. A completely closed system, set up with insecure settings by default. It would run the scripts inside an email when you viewed it, and did not require the user to click on anything. The idea was to make things easier for the user. How's that for ironic? :)
So you have to be defensive in your use of more open systems, because anybody could have written malicious code for you, and you're lacking the walls of the walled garden to protect you.
As I've been stating through the thread, I am taking this stance because I want to be lazy and safe when using my phone. I don't need or want another full-blown computer to take care of, update, and defend. The trick will be getting the right "jailbreak" switch that's easy for technical people to flip, but very difficult for lay-people to get tricked into.
That's possibly the stupidest argument I've heard all day.
Outlook is nowhere near open. Popular open source mail clients have a much better security record than Outlook. Security failings of Microsoft are a ridiculous way to argue against openness.
Now if you are a corporate software developer and you want to build some sort of workflow application (remember this is in the days before the web was ubiquitous) you could very easily do it with just Outlook and Exchange, which you had. Chances are someone in your department could do it, you wouldn't even need to involve your IT department.
Microsoft were naive to think that the features they included wouldn't be abused, I'm not excusing them there. Of course software can be more secure if it does less. Like the very best firewall is the AirGap(tm).
Beyond that, there's another article on HN front page that talks about the painfulness of upgrades to the android OS, and how various phones run different versions.
My basic thing was that yes, I can understand it, but I don't want to worry. I just want a phone, that runs some chunk of apps. The lack of management capability is a feature, as well as a handcuff.
"It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord’s pleasure and fear his anger."
Unfortunately for Android, many or even most consumers prefer a Disney-fied experience. Can Android achieve that without the walled-garden approach?
One such killer-app could be the competition on the handsets. I have an HTC Tattoo - it's a low-end device, compared to Nexus One and HTC Hero, and it feels cheap, but it packs the entire smart-phone experience. And it's less than $200 (subsidised on the plan I'm getting anyway) and falling.
It's hard for me to imagine the "killer app" that can't be done on a platform that has a completely open web browser and a locked-down app store. Google Voice seems as close to one as I can think of and note the following things about it:
a) not THAT many people cared. You may think they did if you are a geek/work with geeks, as I am/do, but your perception in that case is way off
b) Apple's restrictions were circumvented via a web app
c) if such an app became important to have to enough people that it caused concern to Apple, they can easily change their policy at any time to allow it.
I mean, there are a couple of things I'd really like to do on my iPhone OS devices (ScummVM on iPad would be awesome... yeah, I know I could theoretically jailbreak) but these are really minor annoyances compared to what I get out of the platform. It's just a pragmatic choice for me, not a holy war. And I can quit anytime. Really -- my cost of switching away from iPhone is the cost of replacing like 5 or 6 $2.99 apps.
Jiggly boobs apps may be popular (within a fairly narrow niche), but hardly anybody is going to switch devices over that. It's something people download on a whim and play with for a couple of minutes then never open again. Welcome to the $0.99 software market. It's not good or bad, it just is.
I guess what I'm saying is just this: all the cries of "software freedom!!" as though it were a revolutionary political struggle ring hollow to me. This isn't Stalinist Russia that people are being saved from if they're convinced into buying an Android device instead of an iPhone OS device. There's literally ZERO chance that Apple is going to completely own the smartphone and tablet computing worlds. The great concern with Windows throughout the nineties was that their lone real competitor was going to go out of business and they'd essentially be all that's left and all devices would only be able to connect to them and, with the advent of the internet, they'd entirely control the publishing platform of the 21st century. None of that applies at all to this circumstance. We've won: the web is open. Now it's down to games and jiggly boobs.
So all the non-browser apps will always have plenty of places to be built. Innovation isn't going to ground to a halt. You're just as free to buy a non-Apple device as you ever were and you'll still be able to get to all of the same web services as you do on an Apple device. All your documents and file formats are still open no matter which route you go. All the options are good. So if this topic matters a lot to you, buy non-Apple. But all this talk about them being "evil" seems ... startlingly lacking in perspective.
If not, you'd be building it.
> I guess what I'm saying is just this: all the cries of "software freedom!!" as though it were a revolutionary political struggle ring hollow to me.
You're not hearing those cries from me. I mean, I do appreciate software freedom, and that why I chose the Android device, but I'm not crying it. I'm merely arguing that in the long run, the free device will win. Not free in the way that Linux is and Windows isn't, but "I can run what I want"-free. And I think that's the essence of Brays argument, too.
I don't think Apple is particularly evil (except for the patent-trolling), I just don't think their walled garden strategy is going to win in the long run, and definitely not in the end-all be-all manner that we see from the most hardcore fans.
So Google Voice isn't the killer app. ScummVM isn't. But by the time you're going to replace your iPhone, and the list is up to 15 such apps, and if there's a high quality Android handset that's even $100 cheaper, you might pick that.
That's how I think Android will win. The boobs-argument is good, too, though :)
Homescreen/lockedscreen status apps--it drives me insane that the lock screen on the iPhone is nearly useless. I can at most see the time and read the latest text message. What about the number of emails, the current temperature, word of the day, etc. My dad travels a lot, he'd love an app that simply displayed what city he was in on the home screen.
Instant messaging works fine via Push Notifications. Maybe not perfectly the way you want it to, but well enough that I don't have any problem with it and there's no concern of it eating my battery. Everything in life is about trade-offs. You can't have the good without the bad... or at least it takes a LOT of work to achieve that. Understanding that is key to good product design and sometimes it seems to me that Apple's the only one in this industry that does.
Pandora works fine in the car. It doesn't work fine to leave it running and do something else. But when one is driving, it's fine. Yeah, you can't use your map while your music keeps running. Again, not a dealbreaker. Would be nice, I hope they add a well-managed multitasking solution in the future, but it's ridiculously low on my and most actual users' priority list. You wouldn't know that from the reams that have been written about how we absolutely must have multitasking or the device is junk.
Anyway, all of the points you raised are ones on which people can have legitimate gripes with the device. They and other capabilities may be lacking that make the device not fit their needs. Apple ain't gonna add a bunch of stuff to the homescreen because that's not within their aesthetic. I'm fine with that -- prefer it even. There's a value in things being calm and serene. For me it outweighs the value of having the city I'm in written on my homescreen. Both choices are fine and that's my whole point: unless/until Apple becomes a monopoly (which is not even remotely in sight), there's no reason to call them evil over the App Store's restrictions -- just don't buy/develop for their phone if you don't like it. LOTS of people really, really do, so it's nonsensical to call the device junk, either. There are lots of choices for those who don't like it. And it's rare anymore for things to lock you in (like how it used to be in the bad old days) to proprietary formats that you can't possibly move aways from even if you desperately want to. I haven't heard a single person say that they hate their iPhone but just can't move away because of X. If X being missing is a big enough deal, people just switch. YAY! This seems like freedom to me.
I don't want to write yet another web app. I want to write actual apps that run right on the device (or at least on a VM on the device). And as a user, I usually only use webapps when no good alternatives are available.
> I guess what I'm saying is just this: all the cries of "software freedom!!" as though it were a revolutionary political struggle ring hollow to me.
There is a struggle going on. Now, whether or not people choose to see it is another matter.
Let's keep in mind that that's what's being talked about here. Apple devices. Apple isn't making any proposal anywhere that says that you shouldn't be able to run the code you want to run on whatever device you choose that's not made by them. There are hundreds of them. Go use them, it's fine. Nobody minds. But to look at this one minority marketshare device and say you're being repressed because you can't buy one and run the code you want to on it is bizarre. Just buy something else. To do otherwise is to join in an intensely stupid struggle.
Open platforms (particularly open-sourced platforms) are more resistant to this kind of problem.
> As of now, they’re selling around 90K iPhones per day compared to around 60K Android handsets. It’s a horse race!
If those figures are accurate then it's not a horse race. The iPhone is dead. Do the math on growth rates. The iPhone is dead as the dominant platform and will soon occupy the small niche that its closed nature consigns it to.
Also, regarding the someone hyperbolic grandparent post, iPhone will always have its place, just like Macs have survived nearly 30 years despite being the more tightly controlled platform. Likely (and hopefully), that niche will let them continue to do interesting, beautiful things, without ever coming close to dominating the market, which is a very scary prospect for fans of 'open'.
Also, in terms of the "dominant" platform, outside of the slightly-behind-the-mobile-times Silicon Valley, which seems to have only started noticing mobile phones with the iPhone, the dominant platform, by a long shot, is Java ME.
Even so, there is still the other consumers. I simply can't help the Disney-fied consumers.
Consumers also like to eat candy all day and watch TV, but I don't want to feed them candy and TV because I know it is not healthy. Should be possible to find some business model that I can also agree with.
http://developer.apple.com/programs/iphone/enterprise/
In house apps can be distributed without the App Store.
Incidentally, I know of at least one small business (4 people) which would like a mobile app for their employees. They are stuck with apple on the desktop, android on the phones.
As I understand it control was a major issue. The app was designed to monitor and control a hedge fund (i.e., automated alerts and kill switches while you are at lunch). Hoping and praying that Apple won't break things was simply not an option. Lack of multitasking on the iphone was also a problem.
Android is available to... anyone.
There may be some businesses out there who just don't want to go through all that bureaucracy and hoop jumping to do something new and interesting. Android gives them that possibility, Apple does not.
My point is this, again:
Android is open, and that lets business do things even without signing up for some Apple-supervised Dun and Bradstreet-number-requiring enterprise program.
I never said nor implied that you can't, somehow, do stuff with the iPhone, just that it's a more invasive procedure, and a lot of businesses might not care for that. Also, there is a ton of stuff that you can do with Android because it is open from top to bottom that you will simply never be able to do with an iPhone.
That is going to be a win for some, and possibly many businesses.
Oh I do! Right now I'm calling you a weasel. For weaseling.
My point is this, again:
That's your weasel-point. It's not the point you brought up. Both small and large businesses can easily put their apps on the iPhone without the App Store.
"The iPhone has proved that a mobile device can really truly be a first-class citizen of the Net."
Are You a Sharecropper? · If you’re developing software for the Windows platform, yes. Or for the Apple platform, or the Oracle platform, or the SAP platform, or, well, any platform that is owned and operated by a company. They own the ground you’re building on, and if they decide they don’t like you, or they can do something better with the ground, you’re toast. They can ship their own product and give it away till you go bust, then start charging for it; and use secret APIs you can’t see; and they can break the published APIs you use. All of these things have historically been done by platform vendors.
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePla...
The iPhone experience is not sterile at all. It comes with a browser and there is no restriction for the websites you can open. Google ('the web is the computer') should be the ones to best understand this.
Since when is controlling the quality and security of the content at a marketplace that you operate equal to limiting people's freedoms?
If I own a grocery shop and refuse to sell someone's rotten tomatoes does it make me necessary evil? Not letting people charge 0.99$ for balloons in swimwear using your own infrastructure has nothing to do with their freedom of speech. They can always create a web page and show it to the world.
You are severally missing the point of the problem with Apple's App Store. It has absolutely nothing to do with what they will or will not allow in their store and what developers must do to get their apps published. It has nothing to do with Apple deciding 30% is the price of admission.
It has everything to do with Apple ensuring there can be only one market. This is the antithesis of a free market.
Not only that but I'd say the iPhone/iPad will give the biggest boost to HTML5 video, due to increased demand.
EDIT: better phrasing
I wonder if they asked logic puzzles and the like to Peter Norvig as well. I can already imagine the interview.
25 yr old interviewer: "What sorting algorithm would you use to sort a billion integers?"
Norvig: "Son, ..."
As of now, they’re selling around 90K iPhones per day
compared to around 60K Android handsets. It’s a horse race!
In other contexts it might be wrong, however.
I didn't expect to see the focus of this article on a debate between open and closed and between google and apple.
I found it interesting because I have followed Tim's blog, if only sporadically, for some time now. I have a lot of respect for him, as he is a visionary , and has worked on some of the relevant technologies of our time: 1) Author of one of the first search engines 2) co-author of the XML standard 3) technically very savy fellow.
What I have been wondering about his tenure at sun and his subsequent decision timed deliciously to leave sun just before he became an oracle employee is how it might foretell the future of the sun technologies and how oracle decides to treat the sun legacy.
Joining Google for Andriod- yet never making a useful Application for it. I wonder what he will be doing exactly...
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/12/18/Android-Di...
[edit: Direct link to Android Diaries" rather than a google search]
The one-line summary which started this little sub-thread was accurate and contained basically all the salient details. Most of the rest of the linked blog post is Tim explaining why he thinks Android's better than iPhone (and/or why he thinks Google is better than Apple). None of that material is new or noteworthy, none of it is new coming from Tim (he's expressed opinions on the subject before) and none of it will be unfamiliar to anyone who frequents any geek-oriented forum.
As I write this there are 48 comments in the thread here on HN. 40 of those 48 comments are the same Android vs. iPhone arguments everyone here has seen more times than they can count. Of the other 8, 3 are related to the process of how Tim got his new job. So that's a whopping 45 out of 48 comments which have nothing whatsoever to do with the actual bit of news announced in the linked article.
Which raises a couple questions:
* Is that really what you want from HN?
* Is a one-line summary of the article, minus the flamewar fuel, more or less useful than the actual article?
* Gee, Brain, what are we doing to do tonight? (Answer: The same thing we do every night, Pinky: argue about Android versus iPhone!)
(and for completeness' sake, yes, I flagged this link)