What a weird platform the iPhone is, when established companies like Opera have to resort to such things.
Apple has placed very few restrictions on the iPhone, almost exclusively so that they can control the majority of the user experience. To that end, they have said that applications which can run other applications are not allowed. Reflecting on other industries, this doesn't bother me. Do we expect Barnes and Noble to allow people to run a competing store in their store? Maybe a newspaper giving free ad space to someone who re-sells it at a profit? To me it's strange when people expect Apple to conduct their platform in a wholly different manner than a traditional business.
To put the icing on this cake, it would be a non-issue if Opera-for-iPhone simply augmented the built in browser components instead of shipping something which unnecessarily violates the terms of the store. We could easily see a Firefox, Chrome, or Opera on the iPhone if they used WebKit for their JS and DOM parsing and rendering. Maybe that is too much to expect from a browser company, but I certainly don't expect companies to pout and stomp their feet when Apple doesn't give them what they want.
[ http://www.macworld.com/appguide/article.html?article=138409 ]
However, if Apple is going to sell me a phone, then I own the phone. I should be able to install the apps I want on it, regardless of who wrote them or sold them to me.
If someone sold you a house, but with the restriction that you could never sublet, could only ever use approved furniture from Ikea, and you had to give them regular access to inspect the house to make sure you're not violating their rules, would you buy such a house?
Why are we willing to buy phones with such restrictions, then?
That's what Apple's offering: A gated community. Businesses have to play by its rules to get in there. If you too want the benefits of living in its world you don't get to paint your house pink.
The gated community you refer are not using criminal laws; just civil contracts to enforce the position.
So far as I can tell they haven't. And, yes, the judicial system will get involved if you run afoul of your gated community's regulations: you'll be evicted by an officer of the law, and you'll be arrested and jailed if you attempt to remain in your former home after the eviction.
The threat of imprisonment is not a deterrent for millions of people to have unlocked phones??
Don't confuse the home ownership issue. The actions you are talking about (law officers arresting you) come after a civil process is lost. Such civil processes must be instigated at the cost of the plaintiff, not the government.
Apple, and anyone else locking devices are relying on the threat of criminal penalties. It is enough that the act of unlocking the phones is illegal and closes off competition. If it were not for laws that provide for these penalties, there would be a huge secondary market of unlocked devices, instead of the grey/black market that exists.
As they say on Wikipedia: "citation needed". Last I checked Apple hadn't bothered going after anyone who'd unlocked their phone, or even anyone who'd distributed tools for unlocking phones. Also, it's questionable that the law would even support that -- there's a DMCA exemption for cell-phone unlocking, for example, which means the only likely grounds for going after someone would be civil proceedings based on breach of user agreements.
Which means that, um, you're spouting off a bunch of hyperbole unrelated to actual reality.
Here's one where Apple requests to keep it a criminal act to unlock an iPhone: "Apple Inc. submits this responsive comment in opposition to proposed Class #1 contained in proposed exemptions labeled 5A and 11A3 submitted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation"
http://www.copyright.gov/1201/2008/responses/apple-inc-31.pd...
To date, it is legal for an "individual" to unlock their phone (an iPhone's additional behavior, not so certain) but it is still a criminal act to provide services or create tools to assist such acts. The fact that the government isn't currently prosecuting does not make the threat any more real. The threat keeps the unlocking market from being legitimate and pervasive. The current Copyright Office exemption only applies to a narrow range of activity leaving wholesale unlocking a gray/black market.
This link has a solid catalog of the current state of the Copyright Office's DMCA position: http://www.eff.org/cases/2009-dmca-rulemaking
You can see the most recent EFF request is September, 2009. It seems pretty clear the status of jailbreaking is still up in the air.
It took me one Google search to find dozens of quality sources of information on this topic. Next time, please do your own search before publicly accusing someone of being disconnected from reality.
Those are common restrictions for renters (except for the Ikea part).
Why are we willing to buy phones with such restrictions, then?
You purchase a complicated package. Many people have decided that Apple's is more appealing than the others. You certainly can't fault Apple for making something that people like, so why are people so upset over small things that don't seem to bother most people?
You do own the phone. You do not own the software that runs on the phone.
To use the house analogy the alternative in SmartPhones seems to be a house with an ugly paint job, the floors aren't quite level, the doors squeak, the roof leaks, and sometimes the locks on the doors don't work and you come home to a house full of shady individuals peeking around in your underwear drawer. We're almost 4 generations into the iPhone and arguably Android 2.x is the first real good "open" alternative -- even though it's not nearly as open as people like to think. I'm all for open platforms and freedom but delivering wonky products is a great way to push the mainstream market towards walled gardens. No one wants to run anti-virus and anti-spyware on their phone, or deal with a task manager, or deal with apps that crash a lot. Those days are over with. People just won't put up with it anymore. The open platforms gotta deliver a good experience or they're doomed.
I'm not sure what you mean by that. My Nexus One is rooted, unlocked, and runs any software I tell it to, including custom ROMs based off of the Android open source code. Yes some carriers lock down their Android phones, but that doesn't make Android itself not open any more than TiVo makes Linux not open.
I think it comes down to, are you a baby or an adult? Because the baby doesn't know much about the world, and wants a strong authority figure to guide and protect. The adult needs independence and the ability to make his own decisions.
On the other hand, I understand Apple's perspective. They are product zealots who want to control the user experience much more-so than most other companies. They built the product, and should reap the rewards of their innovation. They see the user as their customer, and they are ultimately responsible for the complete user experience. That is their right. Also, its a dog-eat-dog market, as the various players maneuver to either protect their established markets (Adobe), stay relevant (Opera), or try to gain market share at Apple's expense (Google). I would not expect Apple to invite something like a Chrome runtime onto the iPhone. That would be tantamount to Google providing a version of Chrome that disabled all Google ads and tracking. In Apple's case, allowing completely open access would go against everything that Apple stands for as a product focused company.
As a developer, as painful as it is, those are the ground rules. The only ways the rules will change are either via competitive forces or government regulation, the latter of which I hope we stay away from.
The freedom of speech lies with the publisher (the final actor in the chain), not the author unless they are one and the same. The right of a newspaper to print whatever stories they want is concomitant with their right to not publish any particular story -- the right to be censors themselves.
Pre-emptive note: countering with a response similar to "I wasn't referring to the App Store; I was referring to the iPhone itself, which you are certainly free to compete with." doesn't just betray your analogy as incongruous. It would reveal that your analogy was helplessly broken from the start.
Disagreement with this is the source of the uproar.
Regardless of who owns the publishing channel, some developers are being shut out of the primary outlet for their creative expression. Again, I am not arguing that everybody should have unfettered access to the Appstore. Apple built it into the success that it is today. Kudos to them! However, its important to understand why some developers feel constrained and limited by the system
I do wonder about viewing Apple as a publisher. How much responsibility does Apple have for the content, and does this responsibility differ from that of a newspaper?
Initially a lot of people said the App store restrictions were to ensure the safety of the cell phone network from viruses, misbehaved apps, etc. But clearly that's hogwash. Phone's running Symbian, WinMo, BB-OS, Palm, etc. have been allowing the user to run apps without a nanny/gatekeeper for ages with no ill effects. I won't even mention the lack of problems with the Android Market to date..
Then there are folks who claim its "to control the user experience". That's also clearly hogwash. Is it O.K. if the RIAA decides that "to control the user experience" you're not allowed to rip CD's to your iPod? And of course, there is the easy counterexample that allowing users to freely choose their applications (that whole free market thing) hasn't seemed to have hurt the legendary user experience of OSX.
What particularly bothers me is the combination of the strict restrictions in the iPhone App store and the App store being the only way to load an app on the phone. To say nothing of the vigor with which Apple has attempted to thwart users with "jailbroken" iPhones. It's almost pathological.
It's entirely about "controlling the user experience" as you say. They don't really mind the jailbreakers all that much (it provides an outlet for the fiddlers) as long as it doesn't become mainstream.
The way they see it, the problem with allowing people to install packages from elsewhere is that unsophisticated users would use it; fuck themselves; and blame Apple. They don't want the platform to grow out of their control -- Jobs would have a heart attack if it became perfectly normal to install customizations, themes, haxies, etc. There's nothing inherent about the platform that would restrain any of that, the gate at the App Store does it all.
They want to keep it so that every iPhone works and behaves like an iPhone. In their opinion, you should go to another vendor if you want a different user experience, much less a self-created one.
Allowing Opera, as an example, to be installed on an iPhone isn't going to stop it from working and behaving like an iPhone. It'll just be an iPhone with 1 additional application installed on it. Hardly world changing.
It was an extraordinarily similar situation: tons of expected features were left out of the new OS, and large parts of the UI changed substantially from what old users were habituated to. The most popular 'Haxie' by far was Windowshade, which restored the old window minimization metaphor of collapsing into the titlebar, and was installed by millions of mostly elderly people. Unfortunately, that whole class of extensions worked by means of a kernel extension that diddled with the address spaces of every binary and interposed itself in core GUI library code. They fucked over not just the users, but anyone who had to support any application on their systems.
If they allowed you to easily install apps from other sources, they'd be right back in that boat immediately and they know it.
A fringe group of users (and handset manufacturers) have been fucking themselves for years on Windows Mobile: http://www.xda-developers.com/ -- and they've had an exodus to Android, where they have access to a lot more consumer users that would think of installing their stuff.
Might be just a theater by both Opera and Apple. Of course.
But this time there are Google and not Microsoft the ones who steal the thunder from the Jobs god.
Ie: a company is deliberately not allowing someone else's software to run on their OS even though it would benefit their users.
To me it was clear ever since iPhone OS 1.0 that AAPL wants full control of everything the same way it did with early Mac OS, and in my opinion they will repeat the same mistake again and it's going to cost them dearly in the long term.
If not, why?
Killing a proprietary product with a MORE proprietary product is somehow a great moment in our technological revolution.