Apple approves Commodore 64 emulator for iPhone
roughlydrafted.com
roughlydrafted.com
No BASIC. No loading your own games onto it. 5 obscure games, only one of which I'd even heard of (and I was a C64 kid).
This is a sad let down, considering how cool the original app that got rejected was.
There seems to be a huge number of anti-Apple reactionaries who condemn every little mistake Apple makes, without acknowledging the positive things it has brought to the industry. It used to be impossible for a single person or a small team to make any money out of the mobile market. Apple changed that. Of course, that doesn't justify its app store policies.
> There seems to be a huge number of anti-Apple reactionaries who condemn every little mistake Apple makes
I think that most people here are criticising the app store restrictions solely. But with the ridiculous level of hype amount hype surrounding the iPhone, it isn't surprising that many would seek to balance things by pointing out its shortcomings.
Apple has rules for what goes into their store, that they own, on their servers, that they run. You may not like them, they may be completely arbitrary, but it is always your option to not follow them. There are no consequences to jailbreaking your phone. There is no reason to whine at Apple for not allowing X application into their store when X is something, like a Turing-complete environment, that only people who are more likely than not to have jailbroken their phones in the first place would want.
Jailbreaking is simply the software-eqivalent of voiding your warranty, of saying "I'll take it from here, and take responsibility for anything I do to the phone or the network." If Apple could, they would likely put a switch in the settings saying "open phone to SSH access." However, providing such a switch would be sanctioning the usage of the switch, which would mean that they wouldn't be disclaiming responsibility for your actions on AT&T's precious network. Jailbreaking lets them do just that, and is an amiable position for all. Apple "fights back" just enough to make AT&T happy, but doesn't actively target anyone who has jailbroken their phone, and the jailbreakers get a pocket-sized computer with just enough continued effort to show that they really do want to keep their phone "on their terms" (because they could always let it lapse back to Apple's care simply by forgetting to re-break it after an update.)
The App Store is the place where everything is Apple's fault. Program crashed? Apple's fault. Inappropriate content? Apple's fault. Worm that DDoSes sites using AT&T's network? Apple's fault—and this is especially important, because that determines who AT&T gets to sue. If AT&T finds out that you jailbroke your phone and got the worm off Cydia, though, they get to sue you (and they probably won't bother since you're not worth anything.)
Unable to use my phone in ways that I want? Apple's fault.
Or, I could buy an Android phone, instead, and have no need to violate the license of the product to use it the way I want to.
The iPhone has a full web browser, though, which is a much more likely point of entry for malicious code.
To your first point, though: I thought you were talking about listing arbitrary apps in the central App Store without vetting them. People trust things that, like you said, come from reputable sites. The App Store is seen in its entirety as a "reputable site," no matter which publisher actually wrote the app. I'm all for allowing you to just surf to an .ipa file and download/install it, but don't allow people to list a trojan-horse "Apple Remote" right beside the actual "Remote" without creating some form of community filtering or known-developer verification.
There used to be a site that you browse to in mobile Safari, and it would jailbreak the phone. A potential vulnerability in the app itself is probably what he meant.
There's a compelling point here: Mr Jobs knows all about this issue (he and Woz created the PC category... and today a "PC" means a non-Apple computer. That's a comparable ouch to getting sacked from your own company.) It superficially looks like he is repeating the same mistake, as when the IBM-PC beat the Apple. But I seriously doubt that, and I wonder, "what's his strategy this time around?"
Also there are many competitors and there were before they launched. I owned for 2 years before it exists. Somehow Apple managed to rewrite history in the minds of a lot of people.