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Apple Bans iPhone App For Competing With Mail.app
recoiledsnake writes "Another submission has been rejected from the iPhone App Store, this time for 'duplicating the functionality of the iPhone Mail application.' The author claims that his application allows the user to log into their multiple web email accounts and that Apple seems to be confusing Gmail and Mail.app. This comes on the heels of Apple rejecting an application for competing with iTunes and rejecting other silly but harmless apps as being of 'limited utility.'"
ComputerWorld has an update to the rejected Podcaster app mentioned above. It seems the developer has used Apple's "Ad Hoc" service to begin distributing the software despite the fact that they blocked it from the App Store.
http://code.google.com/android/
I hope they are registered and approved to engage in exclusive dealing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusive_dealing), otherwise they may be in hot water with the ACCC over the TPA.
⦠Your application duplicates the functionality of the built-in iPhone application Mail without providing sufficient differentiation or added functionality, which will lead to user confusion. â¦
So the 30 different versions of Voice Notes is acceptable, since it doesn't compete with Apple, but having two versions of mail applications are unacceptable?
What bothers me more than this is that the AppStore restricts any frameworks that one _could_ use to write good applications, like movie players (CoreSurface) and programs that interact with iTunes. If you look at older versions of the firmware, these were all public frameworks until the AppStore rolled out.
While I agree with you, the 9th Amendment states that just because some rights are enumerated therein doesn't mean people don't have other rights that aren't enumerated. I'm definitely not saying that people have the "right" to use a cell phone in any manner they wish, just that the enumeration of certain rights wasn't meant to "deny or disparage others retained by the people."
It's Apple's product and if they are able to, there is nothing wrong with controlling what apps there are in the app store.
Interestingly and perhaps contradictorily, I have the opposite opinion regarding DRM and music/movies.
Posted from a macbook pro.
Its = possessive. It's = "it is"
I wish Google or someone would come out with a phone which is based on a completely open OS like Linux and where people can write their own programs and so on for it.
What you want is an HTC Dream. It's being released Oct 17.
It's a general-purpose computer that's been DRM-infected to hell.
It's what Trusted Computing would actually be like: capricious, arbitrary and overpriced.
...and completely hacked.
You forgot one.
It only needs one thing wrong with it to be worthless.
It crashes on large mailboxes. That's a game-loser right there.
Or buy any cellphone that supports J2ME/MIDP and doesn't insist on them being signed. The majority of GSM cellphones are available in an unlocked configuration with an open MIDP stack.
It boggles the mind that the iPhone keeps being referred to as a "smartphone" when the average factory-unlocked Motorola is more flexible and open.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Horrible IMAP handling, copying multiple versions of the same messages and attachments to offline stores, eating HD space, fixable only by removing the local IMAP folder every so often.
Also, no "View Next Unread Message" function.
Android certainly has potential, but so far I see a number of things that prevent it from being an iPhone killer.
First off, it's entirely Java based. This is just plain silly. Why not have the APIs with bindings for Java? Google has completely cut off other languages. Furthermore, while speed normally isn't an issue with Java these days, there is overhead. Could one really build the X-Plane[1] simulator in Java like they did for the iPod? It's pretty CPU and i/o intensive (calculating force vectors and loading textures, building 3-d models etc, at 30 frames a second). While the iPhone's SDK is mainly objective-C (which I think is pretty silly too), there are a number of languages that you can use to develop with including Python, using an objC bridge. Currently this is not the case with Android. It's only Java. Part of what made the iPhone and Touch so cool early on was that they were little unix systems and one could install python or ruby or any other language and hack together neat scripts and things. Of course Apple has kind of put an end to much of that though, with their official SDK. While Python and probably Ruby can be used, the guts of the iPhone are once again off-limits. It may as well not even be a unix system anymore for all the good it does developers and users. Very sad. Android is open and happens to be able to run on a Linux core, but with core APIs all in Java, there's currently no way to interface from a shell script or to build ad-hoc applications. JPython isn't the solution either since Android's jvm is completely incompatible with Sun's and JPython emits bytecode directly.
Secondly, I have yet to see that Android really does support multi-touch operations. Demos I've seen so far look fairly conventional, using buttons to zoom, and so forth. I've also seen a fair number of pop-up menus in use in Android apps, which just don't work as well as the way that most iPhone apps typically do it. Perhaps this is mainly do to the poor way in which the UIs have been constructed in the Android apps that I've seen video demos of.
[1] http://www.x-plane.com/iPhone.html
You don't need to "hack" an iPhone to run your own software on it (or anybody else's 3rd party software).
Apple provide tools to self-sign and install software on your iPhone as free of charge downloads.
There's two things wrong with that statement:
(a) You have to pay $100 a year.
(b) The apple SDK is so locked down that you can't write the really innovative stuff anyway, hence the need to jailbreak.
On shazam - Well, Sony Ericsson Walkman phones have had TrackID for years. That's not a unique feature for iPhone.
Useful stuff NOT available on iPhone:
1. Multitasking? This is 2008, all other phones can download stuff while the user talks and surfs. Not iPhone.
2. Bluetooth file transfers? Want to share files with your friends over BT? Forget it - Apple doesn't want you to.
3. Wireless headphones (BT)? - Forget it.
4. Memory card slot? - forget it.
5. MMS? - forget it unless you buy an MMS app.
6. Install free java apps? - forget it.
7. Really good signal reception? - forget it. iPhone is on par with 1st gen 3G-phones from 4 or 5 years ago.
8. Want to use your phone as a wireless modem for your computer? Forget it.
9. Sync with other calendars using industry standard OMA DS / SyncML? Forget it unless you are willing to pay for a third party app which is buggy.
10. Want to transfer files to/from iPhone without installing special software? - Forget it.
As much as the iPhone has a cool UI for some things it still lacks a lot of features that other phones have had for ages. For me the disadvantages are too many for me to choose an iPhone over a SE Walkman or one of the Nokia N-series phones.
And another called "Shazam." You hit the "tag" button, and it records about 10 seconds of whatever song is playing in your vicinity. Then it looks up the song in a database and tells you the artist and song title.
How cool is that? I know of no other device on the market that can duplicate this functionality, let alone the usability.
Well you haven't been looking that hard then. Pretty much every mid-level Sony Ericsson has had the same functionality baked in for the last year or so. http://www.sonyericsson.com/product/trackid/
Plus, at least in the UK, you can call Shazam from any handset for a small fee
There used to be a telephone service like that in the UK in the early 90s.
Scratch that, I just looked it up, and the service *is* Shazam. To answer your question, you can do it from any mobile phone (hell, any phone at all), even my cheap and basic $10 Motorola. I love my Motorola, by the way. It does what it says it does; it's a phone and no more, and it's cheap and has good batteries. Functional, cheap and single-purpose. It's a bit lighter than the iPhone.
>1. Multitasking? This is 2008, all other phones
> can download stuff while the user talks and
> surfs. Not iPhone.
*ALL* phones can do that? False.
The iPhone *CAN* do voice-calls while browsing
the net. Voice + Data = no problem.
> 4. Memory card slot? - forget it.
I already have 16 BILLION BYTES built in
(soon to be 32).
Why do I want to spend money for memory cards?
>5. MMS? - forget it unless you buy an MMS app.
There are 2 totally free apps that do MSS.
> 7. Really good signal reception? - forget it.
I've had a total of 0 problems with mine.
> 8. Want to use your phone as a wireless modem
> for your computer? Forget it.
*YOU* signed an agreement that said you wouldn't.
(But I have a free app that does it anyway.)
> 10. Want to transfer files to/from iPhone
> without installing special software? -
I downloaded a small app called "air share" and
didn't have anything "special" to do. Just drag-and-drop all the files you want... in/from any
iphone.
Regarding MMS/SMS: It is far more expensive for me to use e-mail on my phone than to pay for unlimited texting. I pay $30 per month to get unlimited texts on all five lines of my plan - but paying for data, I'd pay $0.01 per KB on all five phones (separately). Data has the additional disadvantage of making me pay for each spam message I recieve - so if some spammer sends me an image, it costs me half a dollar instead of being free as it would be on the computer.
Which service, exactly, is trying to nickel-and-dime me to death?
As for phones in general, I paid $120 for my new Sony Ericsson w580i (including a 4GB memory card), $60 for the second (including memory card), and $30 for three more (including memory cards). I get to run any java app I want, I can write my own, I can bluetooth to my heart's content, I get great battery life and great reception, and I've got a 2.0 megapixel camera. It plays mp3s and m4as, and it has an FM receiver in it for those times when I'm tired of my own music collection. I can run MSN or AIM in the background without any perceptible slowdown (and it uses my unlimited SMS instead of the pricey data).
The cheapest iPhone is $199 (times five makes it $1000 if I had gotten five iPhones instead), and what extra would I get out of it? Internet access? That requires paying for the unlimited data plan for each line, so I would have quickly lost money every month on that.
You can espouse the virtues of the iPhone all day if you want, but it doesn't mean your opinion is the only one that matters.
I see that you're really excited about iPhone, applications, etc.. Here are some facts though:
All these so called "level" apps use builtin LIS302DL accelerometer/motion sensor, which outputs values in range 0-38h for 0-1g accelerations. Do the math and you'll see that despite what apps says/shows, it cannot give you precision more that about 1.6 degrees tops (pdf spec)
Disclaimer: I am iPhone developer and I like developing for it - but people, please do some reality checks sometimes...