Hacker News Reader

Comment by siphr | Hacker News Reader

I am surprised that this is so shocking to the author. Stuff like this is expected and only logical, as wrong as it may be. Apple has been desperately trying to tie people into their eco-system and every move the company makes is a step in that direction whether it may be immediately obvious to other people or not. Also I should mention that I believe Apple is probably not the only company that promotes the use of its own apps on its own platforms. Regardless, it is nice to see some concrete indicators like this article to actually show how that is being done.

View on HN

>> Stuff like this is expected and only logical, as wrong as it may be

Maybe it's just me, but I really don't see what's "wrong" about Apple using private API's and workarounds that are not available to 3-rd party apps. I also don't see how this is different from about every other piece of commercial software in existence, the Windows API is well known to be full of undocumented API's that are only used by Microsoft, for example.

The only way I could interpret a commercial vendor using private API's unvailable to third party applications as 'wrong' is if they secretly use them to gain a competitive advantage over third-party vendors of competing applications. This is clearly not the case on iOS, because the whole system is already locked down, and publishing applications directly competing with Apple stock apps is explicitly disallowed in the submission guidelines. Whether you agree about that is a different thing, but there's nothing secret about it.

As far as I can tell, there also is no pattern whatsoever of Apple applications somehow using magic killer unicorn features that are unvailable to third-party apps. Did anyone ever get the impression that third-party apps on iOS are second rate compared to stock apps? I surely haven't, I'd even go as far as saying it's the opposite. Also the list of app bundle exceptions that can use UIPopoverController is so small, I expect there's a much simpler explanation here. Most likely UIPopoverController does not work reliably on iOS, except in some restricted use cases, and Apple chose to disable it for third-party apps to prevent applications with broken user interfaces or having to support UIPopOverController use cases they didn't intend to be used on smalls screens.

As someone who is not an iDeveloper and has no idea what the UIPopoverController does: couldn't you make a case that Apple is deliberately crippling the competition and, therefore, make a case for abuse of a dominant position?

If it were so it then it wouldn't be about being shocking, expected or logical, but about being against the law.

UIPopoverController is a trivial UI element which allows an app to display a kind of tooltip-style contextual view above the app. It would be hard to argue that the exclusion of this API would constitute "crippling" anything, given the number of alternatives which are available.

Apple has no dominant position in smartphones, so you may at best argue they have a dominant position specifically in their own iPhones.... But if Apple making design decisions for their iPhone product line constitutes an "abuse of dominant position" where do we draw the line exactly?

- Should Apple be forced to open all internal APIs to third party developers?

- Should Apple be offering iPhones with alternative operating systems?

- Should there be an open standard so people can build compatible iPhone clones?

No. iPhone is Apple's product, and they decide how far they will go in opening up their platform.

Third party developers are not fully trusted to do the right thing, and as you can see with Android's malware situation, it's a good thing Apple is not letting random developers do whatever they want.

Since Apple is held responsible by both developers and users to have a reliable product, when they decide to make an API public this is a huge commitment.

Apple has to guarantee said API will be supported in a reasonable way in future OS releases, it has to guarantee to users that calling said API won't result in poor UX or security vulnerabilities.

The situation is much different for Apple's own apps, as Apple can then make the personal guarantee it won't be abusing its own APIs to create poor UX and implement malware.

> Apple has no dominant position in smartphones

Where do you live ? Inform yourself (https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Press_Releases/2014/3/comS...). Apple has 41.6% when the second one, Samsung has 26.7%

I like how your rant about "trying to tie people into their ecosystem" has absolutely nothing with the situation here, which is the fact Apple's apps use some harmless private APIs before they finalize them to a degree to make them public.

Tell me, what other "expected and only logical" things did you encounter while reading the article? I'm sure there's an alien invasion conspiracy theory in there somewhere.

Bleh. Come on, this is just apologist. So much spin here about how "it might not be production ready, so of course they're just 'testing' it internally before making it widely available".

Except...

As noted elsewhere, "it's a trivial component, almost akin to a tooltip".

And iBooks, one of the apps, was introduced in January 2010, and requires iOS 4.3 or later.

People who, with a straight face, claim that Apple has needed nearly four-and-a-half years (more, really, since there was pre-release testing), and since iOS 4.3 to make sure a "trivial component" was ready for the public are really grasping at straws.

I agree that stuff like this is expected but I am still shocked. I think that this kind of revelations means you never really own the iphone you have bought. It is more like a leasing. The only way to own what you buy is to switch to open alternatives.

Oh yeah. Without UIPopoverController on iPhone, it's like you lease your phone, and at any moment Apple may pull the string to that UIPopoverController and take their phone back.

Do you even read what you write or you just mash the keyboard and hit "reply"?

Please, do not joke about my english. This article is about the iphone that has features that are blocked by Apple. If you own the phone, you remove the block and use the feature. Take the example of a car where there would be a huge stone on the middle back sit. You can not use the middle back sit without removing the stone, but the seller of the car prohibits to remove the stone.

No, there is a stone in every the car but Apple hides it and you can't unhide it.

Well, I have lost 7 karma points because I agree with an article.

I know how you feel. It just goes to show you that the masses think a like. :). Here is a +1 for you buddy, for what its worth, I thought the link was good.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com