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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.
Reminds me of this article about releasing Maniac Mansion for the NES
http://www.crockford.com/wrrrld/maniac.html
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
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.
I believe it's called android.
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
Apple, I don't know how to tell you this, but Mail.app sucks. Seriously. I put up with it on my Mac because it's not my primary computer and I don't use it enough to install Thunderbird. If I actually needed a good mail reader on OS X, though, Mail.app would be gone in a heartbeat.
So now I know that if I were to get an iPhone, I'd be stuck with a crappy mail reader. The silver lining is that now people know that in advance.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
It's Apple's platform, Apple's SDK, and Apple's store. Why should they allow any product on the shelf that competes with their own business?
How does a product that they would sell in their own app store compete with their business, pray tell? They are the gatekeeper. Any application could, potentially, help them sell more iPhones if it's good enough, and at the very least, they make money from the sale of the app. Even free apps encourage people to go to the app store, thus increasing the odds they'll buy something.
Why should they allow useless products?
Like 100 flashlight applications? Like the "I am Rich" application? Like more failing social networks then you can shake a stick at? I'm failing to understand how apple has prevented useless products from arriving at the app store.
You don't get mad at Best Buy for not selling maps to Circuit City. You don't get mad at Circuit City for not selling empty cardboard boxes for $999. Why should Apple's store be any different?
Because, if I choose to buy a piece of electronics, Best Buy is not my only option. I can choose to go somewhere else. If Apple restricts an app for no viable reason, then I have no recourse. If I own an iPhone, I am absolutely restricted by the whims of Apple, and that is absolutely ridiculous. They call the iPhone a platform, then they need to treat it as a platform. Since you sound like a Mac person, let me ask you this: What if Apple came out with their own massively powerful graphics editor, and then they told Adobe to take a hike because Photoshop was competing with their app on OS X. No one would stand for that. Yet everyone seems to accept it on the iPhone. It's unacceptable. [For the purposes of disclosure - I do own an iPhone and I do own a MacBook running OS X, so I'm definitely not Anti-Apple. This whole App Store thing, though, is incredibly dangerous precedent and disturbs me greatly.]
It's Apple's platform, Apple's SDK, and Apple's store.
It's also my iPhone (were I to have bought one).
Why should they allow any product on the shelf that competes with their own business?
What are they selling Mail.app for these days? Oh, wait - it's included for free. So, let's rephrase your question so that it makes sense: why should they allow any product on the shelf that enhances part of the OS? Answer: because then it makes their OS more attractive to users. This is generally regarded as a good thing. At least they thought so when they offered Firefox for OS X for download from their own site, even though Firefox "competes" with their own Safari.
You don't get mad at Best Buy for not selling maps to Circuit City. You don't get mad at Circuit City for not selling empty cardboard boxes for $999. Why should Apple's store be any different?
Last I checked, Best Buy and Circuit City haven't gone out of their way to prevent me from installing software I've bought elsewhere.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
When was a device built by Apple a democratic system? If I have a party do I have to invite everyone even if I do not like them?? Certainly not..
In short.. If you do not like the iPhone, then dont buy one. That is your right, and Apple is not holding a gun to your head. What they are trying to do, however, is to provide the experience that they want and not yours. If that means that they hurt some people's feelings along they way, then they seem fine with that... Personally, I am too...
One might have thought you were trying to make a reasonable point, right up until your Apple fanboism shone through:
Because clearly, once Apple has created a product it's PERFECTION! Nobody should even bother to do anything encroaching on so much as the realm surrounding the vision of the idea that Apple coded. By golly, if we were to have more than one email client on a computer the whole technology thing would never have picked up steam!
Or, perhaps competition is good? Perhaps there actually ARE multiple products that do essentially the same thing and the world hasn't coming crashing down on our heads? Perhaps we have these concepts of markets and supply and demand that are capable of weeding out useless products without bothering our Beneficent Apple Overlords with having to take time out of their day? I wonder why nobody's ever tried such a thing? Customers deciding whether they like a product or not? Whoddathunkit?
But I'll give you better than you deserve and actually look past the Jobs worship to reply.
For starters, competition is good for consumers and stifling it is wrong--sometimes legally, sometimes "just" morally. The idea that we should permit it to chase every last dollar is what's wrong with this country. Corporations exist and are given all sorts of benefits by our government. Our government is supposed to exist to do the things which are best for its populace as a whole. Holding up the idea that two products competing on their merits and one being crushed by the power of the company who produced the other as somehow equally beneficial to us is ridiculous. Would we be having this discussion if it were Microsoft or IBM of a few decades ago that was crushing its competition beneath its heel?
Beyond that, Apple isn't creating these things to be generous to you, even within the context of the iPhone. They're using your work to make money. A cursory glance at their developer program page shows they take a 30% cut off the top. But more to the point, they're using you to populate their application library so more people will shell out hundreds of dollars to get that shiny new iPhone.
There's nothing wrong with this, but all previous objections aside (and let's face it, storing a few Kb on their servers for apps that never sell isn't going to hurt Apple) the least they could do when you actually DO agree to let them use you that way is not spit in your face, wave their arms and scream "oh no no no! *WE* coded something like that already, you can't!" If it's so useless, let it languish in obscurity. Don't ruin somebody's hard work. If it's not useless, if it's something people actually would want and they're squashing it... well, maybe that Apple glow dims because that's no better than anything Microsoft ever did.
The better example, of course, would be "you don't get mad at Best Buy for not selling Circuit City's products." My response is simple: Best Buy doesn't have a program whereby they let you store your products on their shelves, integrate with their system and take a cut of your profits either. If they did, I would be equally pissed at them if they decided that nobody could produce anything that they already stocked. It's all a crappy example, though, since physical goods and digital ones vary in so many important ways. This IS Slashdot, I'd expect you to be aware of that. It comes up in every damn story about copyright infringement, which is like every other story as it is.
Even if I don't support it in any case, it is about duplication of *apple's* software functionality. So it doesn't matter if there are 45 versions of flashlight apps, apple doesn't have one so they don't care. When you start to design your music player, mail and itunes app, then you get into the problems.
But by using a different distribution method (jailbroken device + cydia or installer.app) you could duplicate the functionality of apple's own apps.
Trolls are like broken clocks. They show the truth two times a day. The rest of the day they talk nonsense.
This is making me not only completely refuse to ever buy an iPhone, but also making me wary of buying more Macs in the future.
Apple was moving in a good direction with Mac OS X by basing their platform on BSD and building it on open source software. Now we see them pulling stuff like this.
How long until they start restricting what can be installed on Macs?
I may just return to using Linux on the desktop. Many of the issues I was annoyed with that caused me to switch to OS X in 2003 have been worked out, and I can probably deal with the remaining ones.
*grumble* just when Apple was starting to get really awesome, they pull stuff like this. Very disappointed in them.
Part of the problem is that Apple hasn't built their existing applications to be removable, so even if they allowed the these competing apps they'd still be competing against entrenched applications (like IE on Windows).
Now, I don't think it's quite as bad as IE on Windows, but only because at this point it's sort of in a middle-ground between a real handheld computer and an embedded system. But still, Apple should just treat it like a real handheld system, allow competing applications, open all the APIs and allow their applications to be removed.
When was a device built by Apple a democratic system?
Just to answer, when the Apple ][ was sold, the documentation included full schematics and a listing of the ROM. It also included a section on how to build an interface card that would work in one of the 8 slots. I don't think I have owned a machine that was more open than the Apple ][.
Apple is a private corporation and they can run their service any way they wish as long as they are not in violation of the law. So far as I'm aware, they aren't, so I don't think "rights" come into play here. The devices in question are sold under certain terms, and if you don't like them you're free not to give Apple your money. The cellphone market is competitive as hell, and there are plenty of alternatives (and while the iPhone may be the slickest thing out there right now, the competition will catch up.)
However, otherwise I agree with you: I'd certainly never choose to develop for the iPhone, knowing that Apple might choose to eradicate my hard work at any time. Forget it. Now, I suppose Apple could set up an "Applications Approval Commission" that would prepare guidelines for what is an "acceptable" application for the iPhone at any particular time. Furthermore, this Commission could accept submissions of proposed ideas from independent developers, and would approve/disapprove of those ideas for use on the iPhone. Hell, they might even decide that some of those ideas would be good enough for Apple to develop for itself.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I'm not an Apple fan.
Not only is it not a state, it's not policed that tightly. There are limits on competition, and it's severely closed down, but it doesn't clamp down on users the way a police state clamps down on its citizens. I would compare it more to a fascist state rather than a police state. The police state analogy is, let's face it, broken, and the only thing you managed to come up with for a comeback was telling me I was in denial (not to mention an Apple fan). Surely you can come up with something with a little more substance than that?
Yeah, ever since we invented modern politics. And look how worse off we are for it!
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Contraction? No. Hypocritical really. One or the other I am afraid. I will elaborate.
The fence is only wide enough for one of us and it is I who elected to sit on it long before most so I'm claiming (having taken my troll hits for it) that right.
DRM is DRM. Understand the term. Copy protection is but a single aspect of DRM. Unfortunately people have taken it too far on both sides of the fence. Again, read what DRM really is before the pundits and media got ahold of it. I can agree with someone's right to protect their (even) intellectual property as that is currently supported via law. When it interferes makes the system unworkable then we need to look at the laws and not the applications. Does there really need to be a law? If so how is it enforced? If no then how do we retain/obtain a free market? If we can attain that level is that really what we want as, really, it won't fix much of what people think it will?
Look at the term. Passwords are a form of DRM. CHMOD is a form of DRM.
I am aware that this next statement might seem like trolling but I've been wanting to ask/say it for a while now.
Go ask all those people who claim that information wants to be free what their social security number is if they have one and, if they don't, then ask for their local equivalent.
*gasp* Somewhere there has to be a limit drawn. DRM is nothing but a tool to get to that. Restricting access to digitized social security numbers is, in fact, digital rights management. That is DRM.
People come out, not you specifically, and say things like information wants to be free but when that information is their own they say no, they have a right to retain control. DRM is only DRM is only DRM. Copy Protection when abusive is horrifically wrong. Copy Protection when it stops you from your legal rights or makes you a criminal to make use of your rights is wrong. That I am a criminal for bypassing the encryption to backup my DVDs is wrong.
Somewhere someone got fucking retarded and used the term DRM as their fighting words without actually doing any research. All DRM is, really, is permissions. It is CHMOD... It is a password... It is a limited user account. It is spatial security. Copy protection is one aspect of DRM. DRM != Copy Protection regardless of what the pundits tell you. Copy protection is potentially evil, I almost sort of agree with that if the varieties of copy protection typically afforded an easy backup of the installation media or playable media.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I respect your right to say what you said and I'm not even going to make a single statement against it.
Now that I have said that, what would you say if Microsoft did the same thing? I mean it.. Really.. What would you have really said? Please don't respond with something akin to it wouldn't have been okay with them doing it because of their monopolistic status as that, really, has been eradicated for the most part. They can't even include a media player in some markets. So... What would you REALLY say if I hadn't added the rest of what I said on to this?
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
You know, this is one area Microsoft could really do some damage to Apple in their "I'm a PC" movement. And, (wait for it...) they'd be right to do it!
The iPhone is one of the most draconian platforms ever produced for a consumer market, gradually stripping away more and more of the end-users rights and abilities until they all become a singular monolithic platform where no one user has capabilities other users do not. This is probably the furthest thing away from what Steve Woziak envisioned when he developed the first personal computer.
Strange how the company he originally co-founded on the idea of bringing personal computing to the masses is now pushing the masses toward a mainframe/dumb terminal relationship with their computers.
When you look at the direction the iPhone has taken, it scares me to think what future technologies like cloud computing could end up as, if they developed from this same context.
I'm not suggesting that Microsoft is now the "good guy" in all this, but when their methods of locking everything down seem relatively minor when compared to the Apple Inc. way of doing things, something has definitely gone in the land of Jobs.
8==8 Bones 8==8
Not sure why this got modded up so, as the poster doesn't understand what DRM is. Don't take the term "Digital 'Rights' (or Restictions as we like to say) Management" absolutely literally, just as "Compact Disc" doesn't refer to squished donuts.
The cited examples are not DRM. These are tools a person can use to control access to their own stuff, their own property. It's exactly the same as locking your front door and is perfectly legitimate, no questions about it. Not DRM.
DRM is about someone else controlling access to your own stuff. It is analogous to someone else putting a lock on your door, and you have to ask him to unlock it for you when you want to use your own paid-for house. If he is too busy to unlock it, or even dies in a car accident (the company's DRM activation servers permanently shut down), you get to sleep on the sidewalk. Sure, you can break into your own house (circumvent the DRM), but it's against the law and the big guy with the key might call the cops on you.
You are mixing up privacy and copyright, two very unrelated things. And doing so just invalidates your argument.
If only Apple knew as much about HCI as you, Mr. Coward.
Christ, you're right. In my position as a Human spending decades Interacting with a Computer, I am entirely under-qualified to point out what works for me and what doesn't. By fuck, if Apple tells me that I don't need the orientational clues and tactile feedback offered by a keyboard/keypad, then I don't need it.
Clue: Usable interfaces mimic physical reality. Physical reality doesn't instantaneously flick from one state to another.
Why would a usable interface have to "mimic physical reality"? That's some fresh first year undergrad "Introduction to HCI" bullcrap you've been taught there.
Dig up some research on mice. There's no mouse in "physical reality" and, if you hand one to someone that's never used one before, they likely won't know what to do with it. But spend 20 seconds explaining it to them, and they've used their awesome brains to make a connection between movement of mouse and movement of pointer on screen. Meanwhile there exist tablet PCs which come much closer to the "physical reality" of moving crap around directly with one's fingers, yet they're consistently not chosen for doing most real work.
If your only goal is zero learning curve and efficiency be fucked, then yes, mimic whatever constitutes your users' version of well-known physical reality. But unless you're dealing with a species incapable of learning, "usable interfaces mimic physical reality" is a mound of hairy balls.
The transitions are an (albeit overhyped) usability bonus, but it's nothing to do with "mimicking reality". Reality would have a snooty waiter thanking me for my selection and handing me a new menu for my next choice. Please think harder.
I have an iPhone (which I got essentially "free" from my Telco - which probably means that I spend way too much money on communications ...) and while it is indeed DRM crippled to Hell and generally buggy, while fooling around with it I found out that it was much easier for me to deploy an ActiveSync emulation in PHP on Linux then one of the very, very few fully open SyncML Linux implementations, probably due to the insane and wholly unnecessary complexity of the SyncML protocol or crazy design choices of the implementors, such as using gargantuan Java frameworks to implement the server-side (my ActiveSync server is a 32MB RAM MIPS device btw). Which is a rather sad state of affairs.
I never tried to run a fake ActiveSync back-end before and so I was pleasantly surprised that the Z-Push implementation is very straightforwardly hackable to the point that within a day I got my Contacts and Calendar operating with a 100% PostgreSQL back end of my own design, tied directly into my time tracking and billing system. I use IMAP for email combined with SMS-based "push" for incoming email notifications, which works wonderfully with procmail and allows me to be notified only for emails I deem "important" enough, instead for all the crap that normally makes to people's inboxes.
So in the end I am somewhat pleased with the thing, and although it pains me to say so, unless something changes radically I think if I were to ditch the iPhone, my next phone will be an ActiveSync one, not SyncML.
Another side-effect of this is that I did not load any apps on the phone at all as with this kind of setup, combined with the above-average web browser quality on the iPhone, I am able to have everything wholly server-side, making the actual phone the least important element in the overall scheme of things.
Honestly, how many people would buy an apple computer if the osx only allows you to run apple's mail.app (no thunderbird/entourage), only safari (no firefox), only iwork, only finder etc? I guess probably nobody would, except a few brain dead people.
So we can conclude that apple's computers and iphones are substantially different. The former lets you use competitor's software (eg firefox instead of safari) which the latter won't.
Another conclusion is that apple can leverage their obsessive control on iphones, which to be frank, don't have much of a direct competition, but in the field of personal computers (where the competition is much greater) the situation is very different and they have to do their best to stay afloat.
Trolls are like broken clocks. They show the truth two times a day. The rest of the day they talk nonsense.