Apple Tells Gliph to Remove App's Bitcoin Transfer Function
coindesk.com
coindesk.com
I have a feeling that they only keep HTML5 apps around as a pre-emptive defense against anti-trust.
[1] http://www.mobilexweb.com/blog/safari-ios7-html5-problems-ap...
It's even more disappointing that Apple has implemented web push notifications... on desktop only. It's a natural fit for their webapp functionality but I don't hear anything about it being implemented. That plus the ability to register a URL scheme would really be all I'd want from Apple.
iOS 7 was a pretty shaky release in general, Apple's own native apps haven't received a lot of love during the transition either.
> Why re-build iWork in HTML5?
Windows.
> Why add web notifications?
...for Mac only. I strongly doubt web notifications will ever appear on iOS.
To be fair, Apple has been a much more responsible steward of the mobile web than Microsoft in the IE6 days, but that's damning by faint praise. Ultimately, they care most about their closed app ecosystem, and the web is an afterthought by comparison.
I really can't blame Apple for wanting to prevent potentially illegal content. When you allow that, you open yourself up to FBI raids, wiretapping, and other unplanned nuisances.
Are there really full Bitcoin wallets on Android? I'm glad that Apple's strict guidelines at least partly force developers to employ smarter decisions regarding disk space, network usage, and battery life (traditional Bitcoin wallets download the entire block chain and constantly poll the network for updates).
But this is ridiculous. I can use my Citibank app, the PayPal app, or whatever else, to pay for things that might not be legal either. Square could facilitate me receiving money for illegal things. It's hard to see why these are all allowed, but Bitcoin isn't.
Edit for clarity: I interpret "facilitates, enables, or encourages an activity – that is not legal in all the locations in which the app is available" to mean that the act of making a Bitcoin transaction is illegal in certain jurisdictions.
In regard to China specifically they explicitly said last week that it is still legal for private Chinese citizens to use Bitcoin.
Would you be mad at Walmart for not selling a new supplement that was of "disputed legality"?
(But both issues are easily sidestepped so I don't care very much...)
There are apps to access Reddit in the app store.
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Eliz2/9-10/60
> Criminal liability for complicity in another’s suicide.
> (1)A person who aids, abets, counsels or procures the suicide of another, or an attempt by another to commit suicide, shall be liable on conviction on indictment to imprisonment for a term not exceeding fourteen years.
This law is mostly used to prevent more active assistance in suicide, but it is also used to prevent people giving advice about how to complete suicide.
So, that's one current sub reddit.
In the past there were jailbait subreddits. I never visited so I have no idea about the content, but English law is stricter than US law around images of people under the age of 18.
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1qa5ff/what_is_th...
Not "Your app is illegal somewhere," when this claim is dubious at best.
USA: “We all recognize that virtual currencies, in and of themselves, are not illegal,” Mythili Raman, acting assistant attorney general at the Justice Department’s criminal division, said at the hearing. Source: http://seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2022288065_b...
China: "The People’s Bank of China [...] has stopped short of banning the world’s most popular digital currency outright". IOW they still allow people to trade bitcoins, if they wish to. Source: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/12/china_bank/
Thailand: the Bank of Thailand may display an anti-Bitcoin stance, but they have no legislative power to declare Bitcoin illegal: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=264389.0;all
When Bitcoin interacts with existing financial services, the regulator may decide to not allow those interactions to occur. This is no reflection on Bitcoin itself which is not illegal.
To me it is clear that Apple tries to stifle adoption and innovation in the Bitcoin area by disallowing those apps on their platform.
Apple would have zero reason for banning such lightweight clients, as they consume no more resources than a typical app.
There are several wallets on Android that do not rely on any servers except for the Bitcoin network servers.
Bitcoin Wallet by Andreas Schildbach: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.schildbach.... Mycelium Bitcoin Wallet by Mycelium Developers: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mycelium.w...
They both do not store the full Blockchain.
Bitcoin is a risk on the controlled environment they have.
Being practical, this means that theres space for a solution to charge intermediary commission and let apple have its piece of the pie.
My crystal ball says Apple will likely release their own wallet services in the future and when they do, they don't want any competition.
My feeling has been that the major companies don't want to acknowledge Bitcoin yet and are waiting a bit to see how things play out. Not supporting it for a while won't hurt them too much financially. They lose some transaction fees but don't have to support a new payment type.
My local bus service sells bus tickets through an iOS app and they have to give up 30% of the sale to Apple. Even major retailers like Amazon and B&N ended up removing in app purchases back in 2011 [1] to avoid Apple taking 30% of their business. They are not even allowed to link to their own web stores from their apps.
Frankly I'm just amazed Gliph ever got that functionality in there in the first place.
[1] http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20082925-93/apple-forces-am...
The in-app purchase rule only applies to virtual goods. A bus ticket, much like a plane ticket, should not fall under this rule. And, in fact, you are prohibited from selling real-world items via in-app purchase.
What you're buying isn't the virtual ticket. It's the bus ride.
So it's pretty clear that Apple does allow financial transactions to happen in apps, without taking a cut or anything. What's unclear is why they would allow this for Citibank, LevelUp, etc., but not for bitcoin.
Which is nonsense, of course. Things are legal unless explicitly made illegal.
We should try and stop them, of course, but why risk it by making iOS your first platform, and even your only platform for a while, if you you're building an app that has a very high chance of getting banned by Apple for arbitrary self-interested reasons.
We survived 8 iOS releases with Bitcoin functionality in the app store without hiding that functionality to Apple.
(Gliph iOS Dev)
On the other hand, realistically, the app store is the only way to get apps onto an iPhone for the general public. They can easily control things there because it's the app store or bust.
Safe to say that the ability to release unapproved applications on the Mac is now considered a bug by Apple, and being addressed accordingly.
Used to be you could install any app you wanted. Now, Gatekeeper is set to deny apps from publishers that haven't paid the yearly Apple tax (aka 'registered' developers which costs $99 a year). Note that Gatekeeper has one additional setting which is app store only. Expect this to be the default in another year or two.
Yes, you can adjust this setting yourself, but most users won't change it. This will kill off most hobbyist development on the Mac and a large percentage of open source apps (GPL apps, the most popular open source license, aren't permitted in the App Store).
For people like my parents, who never use any third-party apps and routinely move the entire Safari app to their desktop (I think they think it's a shortcut or something lol), Gatekeeper is useful. I'm just glad they're off PCs now; the number of tech-support calls I get from them has dropped dramatically.
"Firefox" can't be opened because it was not downloaded from the Mac App Store.
Your security preferences allow installation of only apps from the Mac App Store.
Safari downloaded this file today at...
Fairly banal, but by far and large that's because the assumption that switching the default to the MAS-only option would be a novel attempt at total exclusion shouldn't be true, give or take the major assumption outlined above: not so when the current default's in fact "Mac App Store and identified developers" - narrowing the locus of trusted sources, then, is a change that should happen independently of how easy it'll be to get an unsigned app running.
I'd wager that when Apple switches it to Mac App Store only by default, lots of open source developers will simply give up on Macs. I was planning on developing for Mac myself. Even bought a second hand Macbook to fire things up. But the way Apple works, I just don't trust that it'll be viable in a couple years. Given Apple's arbitrary application of rules in the iOS ecosystem, I have a dim view of the Mac's future in terms of openness. I decided instead to continue to focus on Windows and expand into *nix and Android.
Projecting that Apple'll change both the default position of a radio button and their marginalia and messaging around Gatekeeper is different (as a somewhat more substantial change) from your premise, though.
Most of us that had been watching Apple had projected that Apple would launch a Mac App store and make it the main place to get Mac software while still keeping clauses in their App Store license that are GPL hostile. That came to pass. As for Gatekeeper, expect that Apple will switch the setting in the next couple years. After all, Mac went from allowing installs of any software by default to restricting unsigned apps, essentially going from the lowest Gatekeeper setting to the middle, with little fanfair and minimal pushback from their userbase. They'll have an easy time taking it the next step as well. It's only really holdouts like Adobe that aren't in the app store that matter at this point. And Apple will likely force them into the App Store to get their 30% cut in the next couple years with the Gatekeeper change.
All of this fits with Apple's core values of making things easy, exercising complete control, and forcing an excessive revenue share from all publishers. It already works that way for iPhone/iPad/iPod apps, music, videos and books. The only holdout is Mac apps and that will happen soon enough. The only folks that usually argue that it won't are the so-called Mac power-users who continue to think that they are critical to Apple's success. This was true for a time when they catered to media professionals. But they don't anymore, nor do they have to. Apple's entire desktop/laptop hardware business accounts for 12% of their revenue and falling. They're a pure consumer company now, not a computer/tech company anymore. There's simply more money in it. That's why their bread and butter OS, iOS, is so completely locked down compared to all of their competitors. There's no reason for them not to follow suit on the desktop/laptop and get their 30% there as well.
There's also the question of their role: while "power users"'ll make up little direct contribution to Apple's haul, they've forced Apple to expedite the usual inscrutability at times: Apple's been fairly quick with the reassurances after the dual (perceived) fiascoes that were the half-done rehaulings of both FCPX and the-suite-formerly-known-as-iWork.
The question then becomes whether a variable amount of scorn'll sufficiently tarnish the Mac platform as a whole, and whether it retains any inertia to overcome any blip in opinion; that'll depend on what proportion of Apple's Mac owners do care - that hasn't been established specifically for the Mac itself. But it's fairly easy to project along the lines of your note on Apple's dependence on the consumer when accounting for all business: no doubt adoption rates during the past few years've been up to the halo effect, and we only need decide whether the proportions line up - the power users, after all, have always remained, by definition, a minority; they've thus always had a disproportionate amount of influence.
But you're arguing just as well for simply getting rid of their business selling computers: perhaps they could just as well play that chance and feel all the better focused for having fallen into the second. I'm sure there's a surprise within that mold happening within Apple's future; it'd at least give the analysts an impression of sufficient prescience. (Or they'd grant the issue sufficient apathy on that front solely on the basis that their computer lines have reverted back into one of their self-proclaimed "hobby" niches - half the fun of Kremlinology's in tossing away the assumption that every actor must constantly execute, chop-chop.)
(Which takes me back to your first - I do understand that both App Stores don't even so much as consider OSS licences: precisely my claim that "I doubt open-source developers were paying to have their executables codesigned in the first place".)
FCPX and it's still less-than-previous-version-abilities and the abandonment of the Power Mac for so long are perfect examples of 'power users' being de-emphasized across Apple. Power users and media professionals were a much larger part of Apple's business in the past. They're an extremely tiny part of their business today and, as evidenced by Apple's own decisions and behavior, worth paying a little bit of attention to eventually, but not much.
The main reason for Apple to continue to build laptops and desktops is in service to their iOS and media businesses. Folks still need tools to build apps and put together media.
And as for open source projects having their code signed, LibreOffice, Mozilla Firefox, OpenOffice.org, my own PortableApps.com, etc would politely disagree with you. Being open source doesn't preclude paying to sign or having a business model. But the app store's onerous licensing agreement does preclude some of my apps from ever being able to be offered.
An equivalence to Microsoft - I'm raising a great deal of them only because I believe having everyone rush to emulate Apple's MO has a bit of their exceptionalism rub off - is suggested by your second, though: both have individual consumers, customers dependent on unique line-of-business setups (as to the standard business, media professionals), and independent developers (the last two make up the constituency with an interest in unfettered application installation) in precisely the same proportion - but not the same magnitude. The question, yet again, is in precisely how the proportion represented by "a little bit" turns out to be - and how much that'll be when applied. One has to measure precisely how much's been added back to FCP to the magnitude of their retargeting of the FCP line in the first place to get an impression of their influence. Apple's able to show a great deal of strength, though; I'm simply sizing up the opposing influence.
But neither do I doubt that Apple'd ever deny themselves an opportunity for a bit of bravado: I shouldn't ever be overtly hostile to someone projecting reasoning with overt change and incompatibility for the ideal's sake onto Apple.
Edit: and my thanks to you for the PortableApps as well - I remember lugging around a gaudily pimped-up Firefox (Aqua theme and a Ghostfox-like quick-hide addon, woot woot) on a 512MB flashdrive in middle school, and subsequently realizing that the show of ricer agency can neutralize anyone's ability to reasonably judge taste. A fairly good life lesson to be had early while getting to terms with a teenager's first pecking order.
Realistically, I think the Mac laptops and desktops will continue along the 'consumer' line of thinking in terms of features and functionality. Apple will likely set Gatekeeper to Mac App Store only by default within the next release or two of Mac OS X. Users will be able to change it, of course, but it will still have the desired effect of making publishers feel like they have to sell through the App Store and give up 30% of their revenue to Apple (and also abandon many of their pricing models since the App Store doesn't support variable upgrade pricing, unfortunately).
Most Apple users won't even know they can get apps outside of the App Store at that point, similar to how most Android users don't know. Similarly to Android, of course, there will be some power users that know and make use of that feature. Most Mac OS X users will be completely unaware of the fact that any of this happened or that their options have been limited, though, the same way most iOS users are unaware Apple prohibits third party browsers (unless they're just a skin on hobbled Mobile Safari), SMS clients, etc.
Personally, I disagree with the path Apple has forged the last few years. They make pretty good hardware and were the first company that really 'got' mobile music (and the fact that it needed good hardware and software - both on the device and the connecting PC). I have an original iPod Mini I got and later hacked a 16GB CF card into and ran Busybox on. I even have an old Mac Classic sitting in the closet that I'll pull out and put shufflepuck on at some point. But I likely won't buy anything from Apple ever again at this point. And I won't develop anything for a platform whose owner operates the way and has the level of control that Apple does. Both of which make me a bit sad.
Glad you like PortableApps.com and it's helped you out. We're still chugging along. If you're so inclined, give it an install to your cloud drive (Dropbox, SkyDrive, Google Drive, etc) and you can run your apps from there and sync them among your Windows machines. You can even run them under Wine on *nix or one of the Wine equivalents on Mac (CrossOver, Wineskin, WineBottler, PlayOnMac).
Sure, it's security. So is Apple's restriction on not allowing 3rd party browsers on iOS. At least according to Apple.
- unless they use the hobbled Mobile Safari engine without JIT.
(not that "everybody go buy a Nexus 5" is the answer either. The only way to keep these corporations in check is a competitive platform marketplace with considerably more than two players. Go buy a Lumia, a Jolla, a Firefox phone, a Tizen phone...support diversity, kids)
[0] http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Install_CM_for_hammerhead
Edit: I didn't read your post carefully enough. Yes, it would be wise to assume that Google will eventually become malicious and try to future-proof by supporting entities making comparably liberated phones.
This can work the other way around too, encouraging bitcoin use to increase it's value, after buying a bunch of it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_S._Grant_presidential_a...
My word, history does repeat itself, they were just shy a government handout and a multi-million dollar skiing trip.
>>Bitcoin skeptics don’t see the proof-of-work from mining as a good reason for there to significant value in the currency.
Do Bitcoin proponents see this as a good reason for the currency to have significant value? Why?
This is not unique to Bitcoin -- one of the primary reasons that USD has value is because the proof-of-work involved there; specifically, the ability to create an item that is not distinguishable from any other note of USD. If this were easy, then the dollar would be worthless, even though the actual task of "creating dollar bills" has no societal benefit other than securing the currency. (Not that you claimed it did; that is just a common objection that I am using as a strawman)
Apple should embrace change (think different!) by accepting bitcoins themselves and let related innovation thrive on the App Stores. In the end it's all about the digital wallet which means more sales of mobile devices.
So please, dear Apple understand that the decentralized Internet of money is here. It won't go away so better get all in!