“Apple’s current – and in our opinion, objectionable – position is now close to the complete opposite of its initial stance. From promoting openness and standards, the company is now pushing for an ever more locked-down and restricted platform. It’s bad for competition, it’s bad for developers, and it’s bad for consumers. I hope that there will be enough of a backlash that the company is forced to reconsider, but with the draw of all those millions of iPhone (and now, iPad) customers, I fear that Apple’s developers will, perhaps with some reluctance, just accept the restriction and do whatever Cupertino demands.”
Remember the times when Microsoft (according to many) was considered the ultimate evil within the computing industry? How things have changed
Looking forward to the linux-crowd bashing Apple instead of praising it as the opposite of Microsoft.
I am skeptical of anyone that seems to be driven by personal hate and revenge, and Steve Jobs appears that way these days unfortunately.
They are both evil, what has Microsoft done recently to redeem themselves?
I’m part of the linux crowd and have always pointed out how apple longs to get their hands on a monopoly to really show MS how to really abuse one. Then again there’s a reason why apple has never really ever been able to build a monopoly.
Btw, this behavior actually encourages competition because it gives competition (namely google) a great opportunity to grab users.
The contemporary impression of Apple seems to be that they provide their users with a neat little consistent and competent software ecosystem created and controlled from within.
Many of my Apple user friends like this model, especially the not so technically minded ones for whom the ‘one job one app’ mentality works out great; my girlfriend for example buys all her software straight from the apple website and despite my pleadings to shop around a bit loves the simplicity and security of it all, and after all: if your OS provider can also supply you with a tightly integrated suite of applications that look and feel the way they ‘should’ it improves the OS and enhances user experience for all concerned.
So if Apple’s (IMO draconian) approach to their software ecosystem is so great for users why are vlc, firefox, openoffice et al usually the first things any new user will install?
More to the point when will Apple realise that this freedom is a good thing for them and their users? F/OSS & 3rd part software can fill nice gaps left by Apple’s own offerings (im sure VLC is just as invaluable on mac as it is on Linux) and even point out possible future directions for Apple’s software business to pursue (Photoshop type applications are used a lot on Mac and the users love the convenience of vlc in regard to codecs – from Apple’s point of view thats free market research isn’t it?)
As for the users who like to have an Apple badge on all their stuff: well they probably wouldn’t go for the 3rd party stuff anyway and will still be buying the Apple branded products.
I know this is mainly an issue for the ipad and friends but Apple’s ‘logic’ on this issue is (for me anyway) mind boggling; they’re just going to end up shooting themselves in the foot in the long run, I just hope the users won’t get too screwed over in the process.
[EDIT] The English language is a temperamental mistress without my morning coffee
Edited 2010-04-10 12:05 UTC
They aren’t.
They are the first thing a seasoned Linux user installs or a developer.
Try again.
Funny. I have never seen a Mac without VLC or Firefox. And none of my friends are geeks (I hate geeks).
haha, you realize most of your readers are geeks, right?
😉
Selfhate is not healthy.
I *think* I have VLC installed on my MacBook. I say “think” because it is so long since I last used it I can’t be sure it even works after the Leopard/Snow Leo upgrade. I don’t have Firefox installed. I don’t have OpenOffice installed. Your point?
99% of the time Quicktime 7 / Quicktime X works just fine for me. After installing the various drivers (Perian/Flip4mac)it handles pretty much everything I throw at it. Yes I do watch video regularly. Yes I do rip DVD’s from time to time.
Guess my girlfriend is a geek, even though she really, *really* doesn’t think and feel that way.
She wanted a free office suite. Answer -> OpenOffice, “like on windows”.
She wanted to play her WMV videos and… wait… WMV has been excommunicated from quicktime ? Go VLC ! (Later, she called me because she had some issue with online vids, and I made her install a QuickTime WMV plugin, but VLC was her spontaneous choice).
About Firefox, I asked her to try to use mac tech as much as possible, in order to limit the amount of bug sources on her computer (freeware quality is poor on the Mac, in my experience), so she stayed with safari, yeah. But recently, she wanted to download a vid on youtube, and Firefox and DownloadHelper came around…
And I could tell about trying to use Audacity for recording audio on youtube, or using GIMP because she wanted a free image editor…
Is she a geek ? No. I’m the geek who told her about Macs and am servicing her computer when it’s hanged or can’t do something
She just tried to get the same level of functionality as on windows. And VLC and OpenOffice came in right away.
Edited 2010-04-12 19:23 UTC
But the consumer (not the techie consumer) could care less…
Although I agree that the average consumers couldn’t care less about the internal politics of the companies they support in the same way that people here on OSNews do; I know a fair few iphone users who felt a bit ripped off when they realised their new gadget wasn’t really as web friendly as it sounded. Like it or not (and I do not) flash is an integral part of the modern Internet.
Of course the techie consumers knew about this crippled web experience pretty much from the get go, so in this case it was only the ‘normal’ consumers that were affected.
I’m also fairly confident these same users will feel a bit more ripped off when they look at their techie mates’ droids or something similar that have a lot of cool apps their apple devices just aren’t allowed to have – basically because mother says no and she knows best.
Most programmers I know have an iPhone and could care less about having root. They like the game selection and don’t care about the price or being locked in the app store. It’s actually a minority of techies that care about being able to load outside code. The majority of FOSS fanatics certainly want every device to be unlocked but your typical programmer is just like your typical professional who wants a phone for the installed functionality.
The app store is massive and most apps are under $5. It’s not as if most iphone users are unsatisfied with the selection or price of the apps. Go suck some sour grapes if you are upset with consumers picking a device that doesn’t contain your desired functionality. Devices like the iphone are targeted at the majority which in this case doesn’t include you.
Repeat after me: Couldn’t care less.
Couldn’t care less.
Couldn’t care less.
Couldn’t care less.
Non techie consumer will care when his favourite thing will not work or her/his friend/colleague shows something way cool that his/her Apple iThing can’t do.
as long as it was to their advantage to do so, and on the Mac it still is. After all, how else would they combat Microsoft in the eyes of many? The interesting thing is we have an odd split between the Mac and the iProduct line-up. The Mac, aside from the restriction concerning the OS X license, is actually a very open platform. You can write whatever you want, all APIs are documented, and it has a very strong open source foundation making it easier to port much of the foss ecosystem to it. This, I think, is a result of Apple’s stance on openness at the time when it was very much to their advantage. Use open formats so as not to depend on Microsoft, and make yourself look like the good guys in the process. However, as with many people, they got a taste of being the dominant power and suddenly openness is far from an advantage. Now, being a corporation, they feel the need to maintain their position at any cost. In a way, it’s the same thing that happened to Microsoft. The change, however, was much more drastic on Apple’s part. They went from extremely closed (original Mac) to extremely open (OS X) and back again (iProducts), like a swinging pendulum. Apple, in their own way, are more schizophrenic as a company than Microsoft at times.
In the end though, maintaining a position at any cost usually does more harm to the one doing it, whether it be religion, political power, or corporation. I hope Apple will realize this and promote a more OS X-like state of openness in their other products. Somehow though, I think that’s a pipe dream as long as His Steveness runs the show.
It’s conspicuous that in all this endless moaning and wailing and bellyaching about Apple’s “tyranny” that in the dozens of articles I’ve read on this story and several hundred comments I’ve skimmed, no one has yet been able to tell me one important thing:
How does this hurt iPhone/iPad consumers?
The simple fact is that it doesn’t.
And that explains all the ridiculous, over-the-top, bellyaching and use of theatrical terms such as “draconian.”
This decision is clearly a good thing for Apple’s established developers and it is a clearly a good thing for owners of the iPhone and iPad. Allowing Flash would be detrimental to most iPhone and iPad users and developers.
If that wasn’t the case, there’d be no need for throwing around silly terms like “draconian” and making vague, fuzzy comments about “freedom.”
Edited 2010-04-10 18:11 UTC
“How does this hurt iPhone/iPad consumers?
The simple fact is that it doesn’t. “
BS. A huge percentage of the current games offered on the AppStore, including the most popular and high quality ones, use 3rd party frameworks/ alternate language bindings. Many more apps are written with MonoTouch, Wax (Lua), or other language bindings to Cocoa. ALTERNATE LANGUAGES DO NOT EQUAL CROSS PLATFORM FRAMEWORKS. This is reducing customers choice of what apps they can have. Period. I say bring on the competition/anti-trust hammer to break the App Store lock-in and restrictive developer agreements.
Edited 2010-04-10 18:42 UTC
Right, because Apple has a monopoly, legal or otherwise, on cell phone software and cell phones!
Wait, they don’t: they have their own store, with their own rules of what goes in or not, and it’s setup in a way to their desire. One way to think of it as Apple is treating it like an all-organic health food store that’s also politically-correct in taking fair-trade goods that are organic only: you can sell whatever you want, but the only things that will be sold at that health food store must meet certain criteria, and if you don’t like it as a supplier or a buyer, well, there are other stores!
There’s always Windows Mobile (before Windows Phone 7, which isn’t out yet), Symbian, Android, Blackberry, Palm’s WebOS, and quite a few others: Apple only has a small piece of the pie, and is not yet a monopoly even of the high-end smartphone hardware and software; competition is still clearly sufficiently healthy that, at this time, no government that’s not out on a witch hunt would bother with antitrust proceedings. For all we know, market forces will punish Apple for their actions by widely adopting Android: a platform is only as useful as developers choose to make it, which then developers who want to make a living go for platforms where the customers want it and will pay for it, and customers go for… whatever customers go for, which may intentionally being the more technically-limited system, for whatever reason.
So, like it and buy in, or lump it and buy something else: nothing is stopping you or anyone else from developing for other systems, or buying other systems and their software, so you can still vote with your wallet.
Not really. Apple is more like an organic store that refuses to sell any food that wasn’t grown from their brand of seeds, regardless of the quality.
As food retailers go, Apple has much more in common with the likes of Sodexo than they do with small organic stores. Ya know, companies that get food service contracts for universities and then ban all Coke products on campus (because they’re a Pepsi retailer), or prevent students from making their own food by banning microwaves and hotplates, etc.
Apple has been copy-pasting from that same playbook for years.
What in god’s name are you talking about?
Well leaving aside your invoking the name of an imaginary creature, it’s pretty clear what the OP is talking about here. This isn’t limited to universities either, it’s in a lot of workplaces in the US too. I’d have to say it’s actually a good comparison, except that Apple is less consistent about banning products that compete with their own. Take iBooks and Kobo as an example, Kobo was approved on the iPad even though it duplicates the functionality of iBooks. Yet other media players get rejected?
No its not, because it is completely nonsensical and imaginary. Not carrying Coke products in the cafeteria being equated with making Coke contraband over the entire campus? Sodexo somehow banning microwaves from student dorms? Show me where that happened, and I don’t mean at Sodexo Culinary Academy.
The comparison is ridiculous because it has no basis in reality. But appearently people will agree with any nonsense spouted off at OSnews.
I could go on about how my former place of employment had exactly this situation, but apparently you refuse to believe anything said here.
I’d disagree with that. Apple is clearly pursuing a ‘lock in’ strategy here, which is inherently anti-competitive. I’d wager their pecentage of world-wide sales for hand-held computers and software is actually very signifigant – java apps for feature phones are clearly a very different market than full multi-functional devices like iPhones, Android or Maemo/Meego devices. And don’t think they need to have a 100% or even 90% ‘monopoly’ to have to deal with competition regulations, they just need to distort the market. Dictating 3rd party developers work Apple’s way and only Apple’s way to prevent what would naturally develop into a more level playing field is clearly a pretty serious market distortion.
Apple’s blindness is that they think their own success won’t have wider repurcussions in the regulation landscape they exist in. Clearly the direction we see Apple going with this is having TOTAL control from the device to the OS to the Apps, only allowing carriers to deal with “the pipes” (essentially shifting the paradigm one step from the total-control cell carriers’ approach, which also clearly restricted innovation and competition). The problem for Apple is, there’s no reason regulators as well can’t take an ‘integrated’ approach to ‘full cycle’ of hand-held computer devices, and they’re also likely to look at things in terms of revenue not # of units. Of course, if that happens and it’s decided that actions must be taken, getting rid of the AppStore lock-in is going to be the most obvious remedy, so it’s really in Apple’s interest not to test the regulators’ limits. Oh well, I wonder if Jobs will get canned when these antics back-fire.
Imagine all the effort Apple will have to go to enforce this provision. Imagine that same effort used to actually screen out low quality apps, regardless of the tools used to create them. Even with free abilty to load apps from any source, having safe, Apple verified downloads is going to appeal to a solid chunk of users, and ‘curating’ the offering to only have quality apps will only re-enforce that. Going down the path they are is simply addiction to para-monopoly profits rather than productive technological development, and they obviously aren’t confident in their own hardware/OS’ ability to continue to demand those monopoly profits in the hand-held market.
The fact of the matter is that there is no way Apple is going to enforce this consistently across the board, there are already too many apps written with ‘non-approved’ languages at some level or an other, especially games (not even counting GL Shader Language) and apps which are highly rated and popular. The outcome is simply going to be a little fascist purge of those not important enough to Apple, while scaring everybody enough to maintain ‘loyalty’ amongst 3rd party developers who might otherwise address the wider market beyond Apple’s AppStore. I’m not going to be crying for Flash apps, run-time or compiled, but this approach is shit and I hope regulators start looking at their practices.
Edited 2010-04-12 07:58 UTC
Oh yeah, link to Apple’s 2009 share of hand-held app market: (~99%)
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/01/apple-responsible-for-994…
I like how you were modded down even though your opinion was no less subjective than any other opinion here.
Most developers and iphone use could care less about this news. The iphone platform attracts plenty of developers and customers and Apple has the marketshare to push a single language if they feel like it. It’s just a phone people, if you don’t like their terms then buy from a competitor.
What? Your explanation seems to be missing the explaining part.
Yes, in the exact same that protectionism is a good thing for established companies in protectionist countries.
In many ways this is just another case of perfect marketing and fanbois basically promoting how awesome they are to be not using Windows.. The reality is that its created a group of loyal lemmings who will do anything for their loyal leader Steve Jobs. The reality is that all steve cares about is his personal vendettas and the stock price of apple. It’s a well programmed (read brain washed) group of customers.
I must tell my wife she is a geek . . . .
I never heard such a stupid comment, users want an office suite without cost, a browser that is more or less safe and someone servicing their machine remote.
So that is how OOo, Firefox and VLC get installed.
Considering Apple, do not buy an ipod, ipad, ibook, imac, iphone or iwhatever. The way Apple treats its customers is archaic, I will never buy anything from Apple.
Edited 2010-04-11 11:14 UTC
I think you’re confusing VLC and VNC…
And if it is VNC to which the OP is referring, it doesn’t even need to be installed. Apple’s screen sharing feature *is* VNC through and through.
It was the perfect conn, I give them that…
…toute the plataform as being open, lure devs into creating the apps wich in turn attract customers, and when the ecosystem starts to look to promising to leave, flip the coin and tell the devs (who were fundamental to the take-off) that now they must play under whatever rule you come up with, double their development cost by banning cross-platform development, or leave for good…
Machiavelli would have been really proud of this one
Edited 2010-04-11 21:25 UTC
Civilian reply in Adobes blog
I think that by restricting Developers to a specific set of languages, Apple can somewhat ensure that developers target their platform specifically rather than have developers submit apps that are built for the lowest common denominator of mobile devices. I guess they don’t want to foster an environment that mirrors what’s on the web today. Most websites leave out a ton of features just because IE6 cannot support those features. I do believe that developers produce their best work when they target a specific platform and take advantage of the unique features that platform has to offer.
It is also good business for Apple to maintain a base of developers that are “married†to their platform. Imagine an environment where most iPhone developers migrate to Flash CS5. In such an environment, if Apple releases enhancements to their frameworks, developers would have to wait for Adobe to integrate those changes into Flash before the developers could take advantage of Apple’s improvements.
What if Google buys Adobe and decides CS6 will only come out on google chrome and Flash will only support Android? Apple and all developers that target iPhone OS get left in the dust!
Let’s face it, we always have a choice of mobile phones but when it comes to graphics applications, Adobe is a very strong monopoly. I’d be cautious siding with them on an issue such as this. It may not end well. How much is the web premium suite again? Do you think we would have to pay that much if Adobe and Macromedia never merged?
Adobe is a behemoth. IPhone devs may not be able to use Flash but I’ll bet my last dollar that 99.9999999876% of all graphic content you’ll see on Apple, Sony, Microsoft, Palm & Android devices as well as the web will be created using Adobe’s tools. Isn’t that enough?
I don’t necessarily have an issue with Adobe’s goal of making flash an indispensable tool but I do think that a lot of comments in the blogosphere wrongly suggest that Adobe may have altruistic motives. Adobe’s goal isn’t to give developers choice; it is to maintain and extend the dominance Flash currently enjoys. Apple’s goal isn’t to limit developers choice but rather to ensure that their platform doesn’t become just another deployment target for Flash.
Consider the following:
If a developer uses Flash, who becomes responsible for performance tuning? The developer or Flash?
My guess is Flash.
If Flash achieves 65% penetration into the iPhone development market? Who becomes responsible for how efficient Flash generated byte code runs on iPhone?
My guess is Apple because end users will not attribute sucky performance to Adobe but to Apple.
Both companies are right so there really is no need for Adobe evangelists to pretend this is a fight about open vs closed.
I bet the blogs on here will have a totally different tone if MS/Google/Apple release free tools that allow developers to deploy their apps as Flash files. We will not hear all the clamoring for choice on the developers behalf.
You should accept his bet, and take all of his money. Since his bet it that there will be only 2 applications out of 10 billion apps. iPhone will never have that many applications.