Michael Tsai: Welcome to iPhone: Your Crappy Mac of Tomorrow, Today
mjtsai.com
mjtsai.com
With so much personal information on the mobile phone, it'll be a complete nightmare if one of the applications is really a virus that spreads as a background process. Since it can contact your ENTIRE contact list, such a viral infection can crippling. In fact, in the Jailbroken iPhone community there have already been a couple of viruses.
But on the other hand, they should open up a couple more APIs, the camera, specifically.
I respect the "walled garden" as a business decision; it's Apple's platform, and maximizing its revenue is their prerogative. As a technical safeguard, there's no evidence that it works.
MobileSafari, MobileMail, MobilePhone, all running in the background. fairplayd is the fairplay daemon, commcenter manages communications (all of them), springboard is the desktop, lockdownd is the little thing that checks to make sure the phone is activated (and locks it down if not)
only the top three apps (bash, top, sshd) aren't there on a vanilla iPhone. Apple's apps will run in the background, but other (app store) apps exit completely when you return to the home screen.
Apple could easily write a specialized API that lets you run virtualized background processes. This would be an improvement on the current situation, but it would maintain heightened security.
The lack of a glut of apps, some badly written is hardly damaging the platform, it's maintaining the quality of the user experience, which I'm extremely glad about.
It's really tiresome to hear people whine and moan on and on about apple, and to label anyone that disagrees a fanboy.
If you don't like the iPhone, simple - don't buy one.
I don't know if I'm a typical user, but I still use webapps most of the time. The native apps I've seen or tried are quite a mixed bag at the moment.
Apple is a quick agile company and certainly has shipped products quickly in the past. You're honestly arguing that taking 13 months (or whatever it was) to release a native SDK was because they just couldn't do it any faster?
They didn't have to have their decisions vetted by a management team and a legal team. They almost certainly didn't do any usability testing or write a set of human interface guidelines. They didn't have to make design decisions that they could live with for the next five years, or (as with the decisions made by the designers of the original Mac OS) twenty-five years.
They didn't need to make an official announcement, or run a beta program lasting several months so that developers had a chance to have apps ready on launch day. They didn't have to invest in developer training materials or write formal documentation.
They didn't have to build an entire app store that was secure, cross-platform, usable by customers, relatively free of bugs, and ready to scale so that it would handle one million users in its first weekend.
And, when the jailbreak apps break, the developers don't get hammered by guys like Walt Mossberg, David Pogue, and every analyst and pundit on Wall Street. When end users complain that their phone battery life is too short, the jailbreakers don't need to respond. They aren't obligated to fix security holes or support developers who have problems. They aren't obligated to support anyone. They're open-source hackers, they can't get fired, and they always have the option to say caveat emptor and go do something else.
There's a reason why people pay for Apple's stuff. Apple adds value. But adding value takes time and money.
If these are really the reasons for the SDK's delay and ugliness, then we should celebrate: Apple is already dying. This is just silly. Truly successful products (including the iPhone) happen without this stuff all the time, and these are never required criteria. Your list is just a list of excuses.
Which products are you talking about?
And, if Apple is dying, pray tell which of its many competitors is killing it? They don't have to outrun imaginary competition, after all. They only have to outrun the competition that physically exists.
So, is there anything to be criticised or is commercial success a justification for everything that is lawful?
I think being the uber cool bully who lends his followers success for a while but may turn against them at any moment is a dangerous long term strategy.
It basically means that Apple's growth rates must keep up with the inconvenience caused by their behaviour. And I don't mean just intellectual inconvenience that affects only a small number of people (closed vs open platforms, etc). I mean getting harassed by a vendor has a cost and that cost needs to be covered by growth. It's as simple as that.
1) rented a video from iTunes which I could not play on my iPod, because it was 2 years old and no longer supported.
2) Not been able to utilize my eclipse plugins that run on Java 1.6 due to Apple not supporting 64-bit carbon (required for eclipse on osx). This is after they took an extra 12 months just to support java 1.6 at all.
Apple made both of these decisions consciously. They make good products to create a good customer experience, then base support purely on ROI with no concern for customer experience.
Is it fair to characterize Apple's guidance to developers as misleading?
If so, will Apple's behavior eventually drive away developers, or can they always count on developers sticking around, so long as they continue to produce hot products like the iPhone?
When the iPhone version 1.0 was released AT&T probably was still in the "I'm a big carrier, hear me roar" kind of mentality. But as the iPhone blew up, AT&T released that it needed to adjust quick, so perhaps that's how Apple was able to push through their SDK.
I think in general Apple just has to be more open with it's fan cult.
The fact is, 99.999% of the addressable market for iPhones does not concern itself with these "limitations". It might be irrational for Apple to open up more now.