19 days later, Apple still hasn't approved the Opera Mini app
my.opera.com
my.opera.com
This is Europe, after all, not the US. The average consumer actually has some rights over there. (In the US, we basically have "if it blows up and ruins your face, Apple has to buy you a band-aid" and "you have the right to not buy it".)
That "50 million iPhones sold" from the event was a world wide number wasn't it?
[1] I don't even think that we're speaking about "internal operations", there are numerous external companies and customers involved, how is that an "internal operation"?
One important one is that when courts and politicians get involved, manoeuvring in the system is more important then manoeuvring in the market. This becomes the central focus of managers. Managers without talent or experience in this area give way to managers that are.
Remember, this is not just a matter of flipping a switch. The case against Microsoft took years. During that time, the beginning of the PC revolution, the most important thing the most important company could do was win a court case and preserve a public image.
This is damage that happens so long as the system stays clean. Another problem with this sort of action is that it creates terrible incentive for corruption. Fortunes can be won or lost depending on a political decision. The owners of those fortunes will try to influence the process.
On the flip side, it isn't obvious that there is much return to this sort of "intervention." Microsoft & IBM, the two great monopolies of the computer industry both failed to do much harm. The both were clearly affected by competition. The markets stayed competitive. New products appeared. Innovation happened. They made high profits (MS still has great profits), but no obvious damage happened.
To see this at work look at telcos and other infrastructure owning companies around the world, where government intervention is usually highest. Look at the CEOs of these companies. These are guys who know how to oil the system, not lay copper wire and certainly not how to answer a customer service call. It is not uncommon for corruption to be present. Many countries have telcos owned by members of a political elite.
They would need to be able to scrutinise then change Apple's appstore approval process/policy and make sure that it is indeed being followed. Apart from affecting their macro policies, this precludes that Apple's ability to decide arbitrarily which is pretty important to what they are trying to do. If you do take a more general/macro view, which I think you need to, you need to take into account how this affects Apple's behaviour and the general effect on the market.
The idea that apps need to be babysat and approved is controversial, but worth testing. This is what APple is doing right now, in the market. They are testing a hypothesis: 'An authoritarian marketplace will result in better apps and a better user experience.' Other hypothesis such as: 'some babaysitting is good but we should let people opt out and install whatever they want' will also probably be tested.
I doubt you would suggest the US should get rid of the FDA. It is not such a jump to conclude that if drug companies must be watched for practices which damage consumers, why not a retail firm? The line America has drawn for regulation is just as arbitrary as the one European countries do, Europe is just a bit more suspicious of laissez-faire capitalism than America.
And I highly doubt they are baby sitting this app because of quality.
To put all this in context, I was responding to a comment that could be paraphrased 'Most of us agree what Apple is doing sucks, European (Commission?) should make them do it differently. The only reasons not to are some hazy moral theories I don't believe in.' I was talking about some of the practical reasons not to, the costs. One of those is rule of law.
Food, medicine, narcotics, etc. all these regimes also require relatively arbitrary regulatory powers too. That is also not good for rule of law. We make tradeoffs. Purer, direct democracy for stronger institutions. Rule of law of regulations. Laws for liberty. Each of these has a cost. Sometimes it's worth it.
Maybe regulating the appstore is a good idea. I don't think so. I'm trying to argue that the costs typical to this kind of a decision are high hear while the gains are low, perhaps nonexistent.
BTW, I don't think that Thingie was being unreasonable either. Like he says, the current reality is that it is not that crucial to find the best way of getting iphone apps.
So open would mean "if Apple was forced to lower the demands on the applications submitted to the app store" in this case, I guess? To which I would say, "Quite the contrary." I think Apple should enforce higher requirements when it comes to human interface guidelines, for instance. But it's of course a process that's evolving, and it will take some time to get it right.
One could argue that the demands put on the Apps in the App store is increasing competition, since it encourages developers not wanting to be subjected to them to develop for alternate platforms. I just hope the courts will see it that way, if it comes to it.
If the free market economies didn't exist, how would the Soviets know that they'd fallen behind?
I'm not saying it's an easy question to answer, it's not, but you apparently think it is.
- Both IBM & MS do not feel as intimidating today as they did at their peek. - Technology moved forward in ways that made their monopolies less important. - Innovation in competing products happened - Innovation within these companies happened. - There was fast paced borrowing of concepts from competing products - Prices decreased
Out of all of these, the first is IMO the important one. MS' position in 96 didn't guarantee its position in the future. Generations in technology are relatively fast and create opportunities to break monopolies. Even if it is bad (I agree that this is up for discussion), you can just wait it out.
Compare this to telephone lines or rail roads and it seems like software, even if it is a platform, is not in as much danger.
Microsoft got in trouble for using IE to strengthen their Windows monopoly - it wasn't too long ago that if you want to online banking, etc, you had to use IE and ActiveX which meant you had to use Windows.
Apple has no such monopoly, even in the smartphone space where Finland's Nokia has several times the marketshare of the iPhone.
If i had a dollar for every time that had to be explained.
This can be far from obvious. In the Microsoft case, it was decided that the operating system market is distinct from the web browser market. This conclusion is decidedly non-intuitive, since what does and does not make up a modern operating system is largely arbitrary, as anyone who has used a modular system knows.
What's to stop the EC deciding that the iTunes Store is distinct from the phone and MP3 player market? To me, it seems that the distinction between hardware and retail being different markets is much more clear than the line between where an OS ends and where software starts.
Any abuse by one or more undertakings of a dominant position within the internal market or in a substantial part of it shall be prohibited as incompatible with the internal market in so far as it may affect trade between Member States.
Such abuse may, in particular, consist in:
(a) directly or indirectly imposing unfair purchase or selling prices or other unfair trading conditions;
(b) limiting production, markets or technical development to the prejudice of consumers;
(c) applying dissimilar conditions to equivalent transactions with other trading parties, thereby placing them at a competitive disadvantage;
(d) making the conclusion of contracts subject to acceptance by the other parties of supplementary obligations which, by their nature or according to commercial usage, have no connection with the subject of such contracts.
It may be just because this is a way more complicated app or Apple is set to reject it but just trying to figure out how to defend themselves against whatever outrage that will happen.
I wonder how much resources (time and money) Opera spent on this. This is why I think the App Store is such a risky bet if your app takes months to make or it's something that has never been done before.
(The major difference is that the browsers in the store today use the included WebKit, while Opera Mini has its own rendering engine that relies on Opera's server-side proxy.)
That's really what I meant to say.
Good luck examining that... it's a security nightmare.
So it would seem that Opera won't be allowed to interpret Javascript, making it pretty useless as a general purpose browser.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Mini#JavaScript_support:
Opera Mini has limited support for JavaScript. Before the page is sent to the mobile device, its onLoad events are fired and all scripts are allowed a maximum of two seconds to execute. The setInterval and setTimeout functions are disabled, so scripts designed to wait a certain amount of time before executing will not execute at all. After the scripts have finished or the timeout is reached, all scripts are stopped and the page is compressed and sent to the mobile device. Once on the device, only a handful of events are allowed to trigger scripts: onUnload, onSubmit, onChange, onClick
Unfortunately, it also means it's a completely crippled browser. Why anyone would WANT to use it instead of something fully functional (like Safari) is beyond me. The days of squinting at tiny mobile versions of websites on a 2x1 cell phone screen are behind us, and good riddance. It would appear that Opera Mini is already obsolete on the iPhone due to its very architecture.
Granted neither of these cases are exactly everyday occurrences for your average iPhone owner, but for those people who find themselves in the above situation, having something like Opera mini to fall back on would be very handy.
Opera Mini takes a different approach to web browsing. The pages are rendered in some kind of image format on Opera's proxy servers and then sent in compressed format to the browser. So load times are probably better, but it probably works well only with static web pages. And not web apps.
So there shouldn't really be any reason for it to be rejected. At least not on the grounds that its running an interpreter or higher level language framework.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Mini
Opera Mobile on the other hand is a traditional web browser for mobiles in the same way that Safari is.
"Status update: Opera Mini for iPhone was officially approved by Apple on April 12 at 20:56:00 UTC"