I’m furious with Apple and AT&T right now, with regard to the iPhone | Hacker News Reader

I’m furious with Apple and AT&T right now, with regard to the iPhone

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104 pointsblasdel39 comments

I upgraded from a 2G to 3G this past weekend before all this nonsense started. Never owned the 2G, was property of my current job that I'm leaving tomorrow, so I _had_ to get a new phone ASAP.

I've been looking forward to the official Google Voice app since they release the Android/Blackberry so imagine my surprise and anger that less than 2 days after I sign my 2 year contract, GV apps gets completely banned.

[Yes I looked into switching to T-Mobile yesterday to get a G1 and not have to deal with this bullshit. It would be cheaper in the long run to make the switch (avg. savings of $20/month), but I don't have the money to buy another new phone right now. Shucks.]

I've grown more and more angry with the App Store since more and more horror stories have leaked out about the blackboxed approval process, so I jailbroke my 3G this morning and immediately installed GV Mobile on it and gave the largest middle finger ever to Apple and AT&T.

Fuck that noise.

When I signed up with AT&T a few years ago, they would refund everything within 30 days. Make sure you say, "I don't get service at home" rather than "I hate you guys", though.

Yeah I have 30 days to refund everything without having to pay any fees, less the iPhone restocking fee, but as much I would love to, I still don't have enough money overall after that to afford to switch carriers.

Googling around suggests that the restocking fee is $20. Considering the myTouch 3G is cheaper than the iPhone, and the service will also be less expensive, I am confused as to how cost could be an issue.

I'm on one of their family plans with my girlfriend, so us switching to T-Mobile would require me to purchase two phones.

So tell us: are you a terrorist or a drug dealer?

(reference: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/07/jailbreak/)

Thanks for the GV Mobile heads up. Just installed it. It's still not perfect, but it's better than the Safari version.

There are severe (potential) problems with living on a platform that you don't control. People tend to focus on whether they are being mistreated today, not whether they can be mistreated at all.

Isn't it the desire to control the platform that leads Apple to behave this way in the first place? We need more of those things that enable good civilization: openness, justice, fairness, discourse.

Vote with your dollars. I've put off buying a fancy phone, but seeing the way that apple has treated it's developers and customers I will definitely not be getting an iphone. These days I've been liking more and more the OLD apple. Before ipods and iphones and OSX and brushed aluminum. But I digress. I eagerly await a capable android phone on verizon. Hope they don't screw that one up.

Unfortunately, that won't work as well in this particular case. See, the regular consumer loves the iPhone and has absolutely no idea about the difficulties facing third party developers (it's questionable if they'd care even if they knew). Regardless of what we do, the iPhone will continue to sell like hotcakes.

What we need to do is to fire up a shit storm, and I believe we're seeing the start of that. Keeping my fingers crossed that Apple upper management will: 1) notice it, and 2) take it to heart.

The regular consumer will notice that friends using Pre/Android/something else have cool apps like Google Voice that aren't available on the iPhone, and might buy a different phone come upgrade time.

Of course, there has to be a different phone that's desirable enough, and from what I've heard, that isn't the case yet.

As if Google and Palm wont have their own horrible technological, political and/or ideological problems with their devices. They both have early-stage app-stores too, you know. Google also has a history of no-comment on important issues and closing down / kicking out accounts from their services for unknown reasons, e.g. closing ad-sense accounts without payment.

There are too many parts involved and too little competition that we pretty much have to take bits of any given device and leave other bits alone in order to stay reasonably happy.

You know what the result would be if this noise gets the Google Voice app allowed onto the iPhone? It would be a Google Voice app that I can't use because they don't support GV in the UK. sigh. It's never going to be perfect.

"I am voluntarily going to make my own life a bit worse because I believe in certain principles"

Strangely, if people say things like this before they are, and I quote, "getting fucked" then they get called names like "zealot" and are looked down on for not being rational or "pragmatic".

I pretty much agree fully with this article. I briefly considered putting myself to work on a few iphone app ideas, and each time was put off by the terrible things I heard about the entire process.

Well, as the owner of a 3G, I was planning on upgrading to the 3GS and selling the 3G to a friend to offset the cost of an out-of-cycle upgrade. As things stand now, I have put that on hold and will be waiting for both the next generation of Android phones and my own "hardware upgrade eligibility."

So, thank you Rogers' stores, for failing to call me back when you did get 3GS stock in. Without this failing I would have given you and Apple preposterous amounts of money just a short time before this debacle broke the camel's back.

As to other comments, that nerdrage is just that and that Apple can afford to ignore it because so many non-nerds are buying their phone: I disagree. You can only shun developers for so long, and the amount of irate posts by iphone devs all over the place would seem to indicate that these devs have begun to reach their limit.

Too bad that the US carriers are dragging their feet on releasing readily-available Android phones. They could really capitalize on all the iPhone and AT&T hate; but not with the G1.

(The G2 is supposed to be released in a few days, but nobody knows when the HTC Hero is going to be here. Too bad, as that one is the real iPhone competitor.)

Nerdfury, as awesome as it is to behold, does not necessarily indicate there is all that much hate out there. It just seems that way because it's so intense.

Do smartphones with $40/month data plans appeal to anyone but nerds?

Touché.

No it isn't. Who do you think all these people buying Iphones are.

Stand your ground.

It's a fair point that those who would even consider switching in the first place would be the nerds.

And I thought a bit about the Daring Fireball article -- holding on to your enthusiasts is important.

Yes, I know reconsidering an opinion you express online is heresy, but it's not as irrelevant as I made it seem.

If we're talking about the iPhone, empirically I would say yes.

I think we need to stop calling other phones a "iphone killer" as that is similar but younger than looking for a "google killer" - I just think the iphones first mover advantage; and legacy for the first multi-touch is going to make it hard to move from the top...

-- What I thought would be my stronger point is shorter, I think the profit in the iphone is maximized because of the exclusive deal with AT&T, and perhaps carriers make less on the android; so they then use, cheap touch screen phones that suck :/

I think we need to stop calling other phones a "iphone killer"

I was careful to not say that; I said "iphone competitor".

Perhaps it's an offtopic, but still ..

> Historically, Apple has made bad decisions, but they’ve generally corrected them. The $100 refunds for original launch-day iPhone purchasers after the price dropped come to mind.

That was a store credit, not a refund. And it was a calculated marketing move that was planned long before the drop was announced.

Someone has to find an apple app store employee and interview them anonymously about their decision process in approving or rejecting an app.

It involves senior apple management sitting around reading entrails. Why do you think Job's needed a liver transplant? They needed to check the old one for the reasons they signed with AT+T

Q1: Does anyone here at HN have connections to 1 Infinite Loop?

I am more than curios because all this talk these fast few days is doing damage to the brand and there has to be at least an unofficial statement, off the record talk... I suppose that I am looking for light at the end of the tunnel.

Q2: How can we go about convincing Google to put their app on Cydia?

Q2: How can we go about convincing Google to put their app on Cydia?

I doubt they care this much. Jailbreaking your iPhone is questionably legal, and it's not worth the risk to Google just to let their competitor use their free service. Want Google stuff on your phone? Get a Google phone.

Oh, I think they care for better and for worse.

Google has already proved it is very interested in controlling (or to put more politely, to be a part of) as much of our life's data as possible. When we are not at our computers and we want to connect to the world around us, we use our phones. Their mission statement is to organize the world's information. Google Voice bridges the gap between voice and text, search, sort, etc.

I'm not sure how much legal trouble will come from leaking the app (to the open source community[?]).

There is already an app on cydia using the GV api. (it's free)

My co-worker told me that Google's app is already on Cydia. Can anybody confirm?

How about getting people to release apps as source code?

Those who want to put anything we like on our iPhones pay $100 for a developer cert, but after that could install anything we want, without the hassles of jailbreaking. Just think of it as adding $100 to the cost of the phone.

This would open up regular iPhones to 3rd-party apps that bypass the App Store.

What we need to do is encourage Google to open source their Google Voice iPhone application so that we can compile and install it on our own. Granted, you have to have the tools and your $100.00 developer certificate but it would be nice.

Or put out an open call to developers asking them to create ad-hoc distributions for anyone who requests it.

I was in the market for a new phone recently and was considering the new iPhone. Pieces like this were a big factor in my decision to give my money to Motorola instead (I got a shiny new Ming and absolutely love it).

Life is hard.

That's a bug.

First opened a long time ago, first successful workaround proposed by Buddha around 2,000 years ago but it's a lot of non-effort and can be quite difficult to grasp. First dreams of a real solution beginning in the past 1-300 years. Progress towards a real solution is ongoing and at an increasing clip. Check back in 15-50 years.

Do we really need the constant Apple/iPhone/app store whining on here? It's really overwhelming. And in the end, who cares?

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