Apple bans Android magazine app
tech.fortune.cnn.com
tech.fortune.cnn.com
The Apple App Store exists to provide additional value to owning an iPhone, which in turn directly makes Apple money, which is what Apple's in business to do.
Google don't care what you promote in their app store because they're not making money selling devices. Android only matters to them as a means of increasing take-up of the mobile web, and as a way of displaying more adverts. You can promote the iPhone in an Android app because Google don't lose out if you switch - they're displaying adverts on websites regardless of the mobile operating system.
Apple, on the other hand, do lose out and so don't want you to hear about the latest Android phones.
I can see the philosophical arguments against Apple's position and for openness, but I have a hard time seeing any business arguments against Apple's position. And ultimately, if Apple's control of their platform offends you then you should protest in the most effective way possible: by not buying their device in the first place.
It doesn't matter if people are going to Google's ad-supported services via Android, iOS, Symbian, or Blackberry (or others) - and as long as at least some of these platforms have a focus on the end user experience it creates attention for mobile services which Google will benefit from.
People will see things like Google Maps on an iPhone and try it on their own phone, even if they're not using an iOS device.
And even if Google wanted to control the user experience in the same way as Apple, they simply can't: Android's open nature means that the networks and device manufacturers are free to screw around with it in any way they please, up to and including pushing their own partner's online products over Google's.
Mobile phone networks have a very long tradition of cutting off their nose to spite their face, and Android's openness unfortunately can give them a bigger knife.
I don't think that any single manufacturer has the leverage to tell the networks to stay out of the device OS and just be dumb bit transporters. I suppose Nokia could do it, but the idea's pretty unthinkable for those guys.
Choice of carrier is a serious issue. The other things? Not so much. The vast majority of iPhone users neither know nor care about the App Store approval process, and there's a more-than-sufficient number of happy developers out there to keep the App Store humming indefinitely.
Apple, a single device manufacturer, will inevitably not sell as many units as the combined Android device manufacturers. It's like comparing the output of Smart to the output of Ford.
Apple don't need - and never had, anyway - a majority market share in order to turn a significant profit on selling devices. (And they are turning a significant profit - a quick Google shows Apple were reporting quarterly profits up 70% a couple of months ago.)
Do you honestly think the idea that there will be no single 'winner' or 'loser' in the smartphone market is baseless? What brings you to this conclusion?
If you're thinking in terms of the desktop PC market, where Windows is the clear winner, that's an anomaly and I don't think you're going to see it repeated in any consumer device market.
But if you've sound reasoning for why anything I've said is incorrect, please let me know. I'm not a blind Apple fanboi, and I don't think that Apple's devices are automatically the best choice. (After an increasingly frustrating experience with my iPhone, I'm living with it only long enough for Nokia to start releasing MeeGo devices.)
The closest I come is sometimes catching up on macrumors when I'm bored.
What you're seeing in my comments is not mindless repetition of someone else's talking point, it's my own opinion derived from my experience with both Apple and the mobile phone industry.
That aside, I'm not sure I've really said anything 'pro-Apple' at all. What I said was that this isn't anything new and that Apple's behaviour makes sense given their business model. I've also dismissed the idea that Apple ever had a majority of the market (surely that would be ANTI-Apple, to so much as imply that other people might also make decent phones!) and tried to argue against mindless polarisation.
If you want to talk about something that's influenced by American politics, talk about people who believe that everything is split down into distinct 'winners' and 'losers' with no subtlety at all. From my limited exposure to American politics (The Daily Show, our reporting of your news, and American friends (mostly left-wing) and family (mostly right-wing)) that 'us or them' seems to be perhaps the defining feature of American politics right now.
But now I'm really digressing.
[Edit: my comment might look a little random now. Originally the comment I was replying to had references to pro-Mac bloggers and implied that I was simply repeating their ideas in an 'echo chamber' effect, and compared it to political discourse being led the same way.]
We shouldn't listen to the points the OP made because he read them elsewhere and they are largely baseless. Why are they largely baseless? Because he read them elsewhere and they are largely baseless.
The conclusion is assumed in the argument itself therefore the "argument" really isn't an argument at all.
The points the OP makes are the same points that are repeated again on every god damn story relating to Android or Apple, They aren't baseless, and probably had merit the first hundred thousand times they were argued over, however at this point they're just boring. Every single discussion on global warming or left versus right or socialized health care is overwhelmingly dominated by the same rote repetition, and it's unfortunate when that tactic infects technology discussions.
It's just noise. It's people trying to toss in the standard grenades to attempt to get some sort of points for their team.
Talking point "debates" could be had by robots. They're just noise on the web.
To me though, that doesn't matter. What matters is that the dominant smartphone platform will be available on many devices from many carriers and will be reasonably open.
No one product will win. Some products will fail. This is as true for smartphones as it is for games consoles, cars, and soft drinks.
People do this all the time, and it's so needlessly divisive and tribalist. When the current generation of games consoles came out (as with every generation before) there was raging debates over which one would 'win' - and look, they're all selling, all have games, and all are popular. Sometimes an individual product or company will fail (Sega, in the games console market), but you very rarely really see a single dominant 'winner'.
I agree that identifying with a side or a company is usually counter-productive, but having a strong preference for a specific technology to 'win' for practical or ideological reasons seems fair.
Arguing for any particular platform 'to lose', if it's not clearly already lost, is just baiting. Arguing for a platform 'to win', when it's already shown that it's not lost, is about the same.
Advising avoiding a platform that's lost is a different matter - I wouldn't recommend the Palm Pre, the Sega Dreamcast, or the Atari ST.
Winning and losing could be defined by a variety of metrics (app sales, cross-marketing success of other devices, content-sales, etc.), but surely Apple could take a large step towards expanding their presence by opening up their devices to every carrier. Make the iPhone available on Verizon, Sprint, TMobile, and AT&T ... and commoditize the price of the handset and I think you'll see a renewed fight for the "winner".
3. Metadata (name, descriptions, ratings, rankings, etc)
3.1 Apps with metadata that mentions the name of any other mobile platform will be rejected
This strikes me as flamebait-generation and little else.
This is a pretty epic display of insecurity on Apple's part.
Not sure what the valid point would be. "Where this is going"? It's not going anywhere. A similar rule exists in the Mac App Store guidelines... both of which merely mean you can't cite other OSes in the app store. The app can internally / on their site advertise that they're also on Windows, just not in the store. It's not a very surprising requirement, as it's a locked-to-a-single-OS store, and it's easy to get around if your app has any purpose aside from advertising the competition.
Putting the magazine as an app on the store would be nigh-impossible, because you couldn't mention its primary purpose, but it'd likely get by with no issue if such a thing were achieved without being misleading.
The mind boggles that we're in a situation where arguments like this are put forward. No offence to you specifically Groxx, but... I feel like Apple has exiled us all to crazy land.
But yeah, I concurr, gratuitous use of arcane TLAs can be annoying.
Thanks Google and thanks Android for giving us an alternative.
Let us side load apps, and we'll stop bitching about Apple store practices.
A quick Google brings up: http://www.wright.edu/~tdung/coke-italy.htm
Apple would not and cannot prevent you from reading an Android magazine on your iPhone, but they are under no obligation to publish, market, distribute, and sell anyone's content, especially one dedicated solely to a competing product.
If someone wants to sell an Android magazine to iPhone users they're going to have to publish, market, and distribute it themselves, over the web, just like they would have to if the App Store didn't exist. Why would anyone expect to use Apple's marketing resources to advertise a competing product? Well, they wouldn't. But it does make for a nice publicity stunt, apparently.
Placement in the App Store isn't a right, it's a privilege, just like any other store.
Because the App Store is the sole means of said distribution, the validity of your argument becomes much murkier.
In my opinion, Apple should enhance the permissions system and allow the installation of software from other sources. The App Store would still reign supreme, generate revenue, et cetera and users would largely continue to be protected from malicious software. This sort of discussion would be moot as a result and your argument would stand.
If you want an iPhone, you want an iPhone and everything that goes with it, and this is one of those things. Opening it up would be nice, I doubt anyone would disagree with that, but it's fully within their interest, ability, and right to restrict it. Maybe not best interest, but it's their decision to make.
> Apple should enhance the permissions system and allow the
> installation of software from other sources.
More to the point, Apple could have forced all 3rd-party software to run in a virtual machine, like Microsoft, and Google, and Palm, and RIM. They could then provide graduated API access, make their app review process a hell of a lot simpler, and eliminate the review process altogether for software distributed outside of the App Store.
Instead, they allow 3rd-party apps to run on the bare metal as full-fledged OS X applications. There are advantages and disadvantages to that approach, but it's very hard to argue that they made the wrong choice given how things have turned out. Everything else is academic.
Call me when Google, Microsoft, RIM, or Palm ever allow fully native 3rd-party software.
Regardless, the review process as it stands provides little in the way of additional security, a fact that further weakens your vague argument. Static analysis can only go so far. The status quo is about desire for revenue, not supposed "technical realities". All I am proposing is that allowing apps from other sources would have little effect on either.
Call me when Apple ever allows fully native 3rd-party software on the Mac.
Now, apple _is_ going somewhere with OS X. They're starting to lock it down. Lion will still be open enough from what I gather, but they're gradually changing the rules of what tweaking you'll be able to do with your mac. I don't like that, so I see a possibility of a return to linux for me.
How exactly?
Yes, I realize it is in the ToS as Groxx pointed out but come on. This is just getting ridiculous.
I'd much rather wait until a well-meaning, well-intended app, one that is attempting to be useful to a regular person, is rejected for unreasonable reasons and get outraged about that. This meanwhile is clearly a bid for attention.
Somebody who is deliberately provoking Apple for reasons "uphill" from more insidious reasons is wasting our time. In my opinion most slippery slope arguments are just bad arguments used to make something look much worse than it is.
You though, like many, many, others, are getting caught up in the subjective nature of exercising judgment and would like to see a list of necessary and sufficient conditions that is followed logically and to a t, something like a mathematics that has right and wrong and no in between. Unfortunately these things don't exist. If you look at how government and academia played out we have a judiciary systems and admissions systems that, yeah, have a few well-meaning people exercising judgment about slew of important topics that affect lots of people. It's either that or anarchy.
There is subjectivity about a lot if concepts, laws, and institutions we don't have a choice but to share. The presence of subjectivity is not grounds for eliminating that institution.
Because hey - if you're cool with that, go ahead and get them an Android phone.