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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/
⦠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.
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.
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
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.
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...