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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;
The Iphone is an orwellian police state where everything you do on it is carefully censored and controlled by Apple. Certainly i would never use one. 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. People often fear government as a threat to their freedom, but right here we see with Apple, an obvious violation of peoples rights to use a device that they purchased in a way they wish, and a corporation deciding what people can and cant use it for. This leads in fact to stagnation, a lack of innovation. Many interesting developments and innovations come from innovation and improving and tinkering with an existing platform. A platform that allows a person to develop software provides excellent conditions for new innovations, like new games or mail apps to be developed.
Isn't duplicating functionality the basis for competition? The 45 different flashlight applications don't exactly support the claim that duplicate functionality is why these applications were rejected.
Seems to me like they're trying to reserve the right to develop their own alternative to any application on the store and pull the third party version. Don't you just love closed platforms?
"Fuck it," said Steve Jobs to an audience of soul-mortgaged thralls, "we're evil. But our stuff is sooo good. You'll keep taking our abuse. You love it, you worm. Because our stuff is great. It's shiny and it's pretty and it's cool and it works. It's not like you'll go back to a Windows Mobile phone. Ha! Ha!"
http://rocknerd.co.uk
It's a waste of investment. It's just that simple. The moment Apple wants to do something you're doing, they just get rid of you. No serious business should ever invest money into the iPhone because they are completely at the mercy of Apple here, in a way that makes Microsoft look like they're selling an open source platform.
It's Microsoft's platform, Microsoft's SDK, and Microsoft's store. Why should they allow any product on the shelf that competes with their own business? Why should they allow useless products? 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 Microsoft's store be any different?
Sound's pretty silly now, doesn't it?
Anyone got a light for my sig?
Because it's pissing people off in a way that's bad PR, firstly to the developers and secondly to the users. There's a reason why so many of the latter have jail-broken their iPhones - Trusted Computing sucks to be bent over for.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
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?
⦠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 am an Apple fan to the highest degree, but this has to be the stupidest analogy I've ever heard. It's one thing for Apple to ban apps that violate privacy, harm the network, or even that go against AT&T's TOS (like the tethering app). But to ban an app that competes with Apple's free included apps? If Best Buy won't sell your software, you can always try getting Circuit City to sell it or if that doesn't work, sell it from your own site and pay for advertising. If Apple won't sell your app on the App Store, you have no alternative. I have a regular old Samsung flip phone on the Sprint network. The included web browser sucks. I went over to Operamini.com. downloaded it, and now I have a great browser. Apple would never allow a competing browser,
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?
The average consumer just wants something simple that works and is secure and looks great. They don't care if they're making things worse for themselves. Just look at MS' monopoly. People love it.
By closing the system up it's more secure and they can guarentee their software remains popular on their system.
I can't think of any reason other than Microsoft is a monopoly, and users have next to no choice but to use Windows for many purposes. However, if you're talking about Windows Mobile, or some other MS platform that isn't a monopoly, then it really doesn't sound as silly as you might think it does.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
I think it was fairly clear that the grandparent was talking about developing software for the iPhone, not just using one. And I agree completely with his points. Of course, any company can develop a free program that duplicates yours, but being able to ban your software from the only place you can sell it is much worse. Even as an user, I find their attitude unacceptable, and will not buy their stuff.
Although I very much disagree with the grandparent, your "analogy" also doesn't work because, at least in the PC OS market, Microsoft are, all together now, a monopoly. Apple are not one in the smart phone arena. If you do not like Apple's device, services, distribution model, etc. you can go buy one of dozens of devices form a dozen manufacturers, claiming they do more than the iPhone. So, although massively stupid move on Apple's part, it's fair game.
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.
the grandaprent obviously means that developing on the Iphone is a waste of investment. Most people do that kind of investment with a plan for a small reasonable return and a reasonable hope for great riches if their application happens to hit a sweet spot. With the iphone the situation is that, if you do hit that sweet spot, Apple can, and will just eliminate your application whilst introducing their own one. You end up doing free (or even profitable) R&D for Apple.
Others have compared this with Windows, but actually it's very similar. Microsoft has shown a willingness to kill any partner which gets too big for it's boots by competing against them. E.g. look at Borland which was wiped out by microsoft's compiler suite; look at Netscape; look even at Oracle: they were only saved because they had other platforms. Even so Oracle is in a much worse position because of MSSql than it would be otherwise.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
People here know that Apple is commercial enterprise, right? Google has open source apps because apps are not their core business, advertising is. Apple sells software to drive hardware sales. The have a need to ensure that their application site remains unique and that they control the entire experience because that is what differentiates them. By offering up a competitor to iTunes or even to Mail.app (which offers unique integration into THEIR ecosystem), Apple would undermine their own ability to make a profit. Which is important in a commercial venture. I do wish there were just a few more calculators, though.
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.
The depressing thing is that they did exactly the same thing on the desktop in the '80s, and it cost them a market that they came close to completely controlling. Many of us assumed that Steve Jobs had learned this lesson at NeXT, but apparently not.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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 ][.
Because it's not a monopoly. You can abuse a minority market share as much as you want. The iPhone is, currently, the nicest phone I've played with, but it's still a tiny player. It's not even the best selling touchscreen phone. Giving up certain freedoms in exchange for a nicer user interface is a choice that individuals are free to make.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
It's Apple's platform, Apple's SDK, and Apple's store.
That from a guy who said "I wasn't about to ask permission from Microsoft to use something that I bought and paid for."
Seriously dude, your fanboism reeks.
sudo dial -u 0001 -now linux noobs
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 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
Every week I come across this sort of ranting on various mailing lists. I have worked as a J2ME developer for over 4 years, and I have dipped my toes into the console world as well. Currently I work on iPhone, and it is a dream. I don't like the paranoia and bullshit, but the cellphone / console world is basically just as bad.
Please don't rant about "police state" mentality or make silly analogies. You already live in that world if you own a console. Don't rant about anti-trust lawsuits, the console makers have been doing it for decades, it is totally legal.
You cannot even get dev tools for consoles such as PSP or Wii. The companies won't even talk to you. It doesn't matter how many stores carry PS3 games, you won't ever have a chance to make one without the backing of the right company.
In the J2ME world, most of the sales are on carrier sell decks. To get on those decks, you have to get the attention of corporate behemoths such as AT&T or Sprint. Cell phone development companies hire people whose entire job it to manage "carrier relations". That 70/30 split people complain about is better than any deal you will get from a carrier, assuming they even deign to talk to you.
J2ME - dev tools are free, but you have to deal with literally hundreds of different devices, all with their own unique undocumented bugs, not to mention radically different implementations of the J2ME spec. The only plus is that you can theoretically set up your own e-commerce system and bypass the carrier decks. Last I checked, some carriers were requiring apps to be digitally signed, and limited the APIs you could access.
BREW - The apps have DRM in them; I believe you have to go through a propriety system developed by Qualcom to sell anything
Symbian - none of the 4 companies I've worked for have ever given a shit about this platform, so don't even mention it.
Android - Maybe it will be great, at this point it is vapor ware
Consoles - you need an expensive and difficult to obtain developer box. Every piece of documentation is under NDA. The companies have total control over which games get approved for sale, and the experience of getting final approval is time consuming and stressful.
I wasn't an "Apple fanboi" until about 3 months ago, when I went all in with a Macbook pro (in fact, I once vowed to never use Macs again after bad experiences developing on them in the mid 90s).
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.
"...i mean, how does a fancy screen transition improve usability in any way?"
You may think they're "just" eye-candy, but they contribute to the UI in a major way. Sliding screens back and forth, zooming from an icon to a screen and back, minimizing to an icon or trash can at the bottom of the screen, super-smooth list scrolling, "inertia", and more, all contribute to a sense of place. Yes, they're "sexy", but they also provide significant visual cues that help tell you what just happened, where the document or object went or where it came from, or where you're currently located or positioned within a document or a process.
It's far, far more than just looks. So, in answer to: "does it improve efficiency or make the software more intuitive?"
Yes.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
No one is going to use a third party mail app, or music app, or other app that competes with your offerings, unless it is substantially better. Compete on your merits.
I'm a big Mac fan; switched to a MacBook and there's no going back. I love OS X, the hardware, the general approach and leadership of Jobs.
But this app store stuff is ridiculous. It's reminiscent of MS in the early days. "We encourage your development on our platform, until we get into the space." Just like MS started picking off app areas one by one, killing third party vendors supporting their platform (Spreadsheet, Word Processors, even TCP/IP stacks), Apple is going to cannibalize themselves if they keep this approach up. Even as a Mac Fanboi, I'm thinking this is outrageous and has to stop.
I'm also a developer, and was seriously considering dedicating myself to iPhone apps, but am putting that on hold until I see some change in policies. (Or at least more visibility as to the policy.)
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
And they are calling the people buying an iPhone "fanbois".
Quick logic lesson for ya; the existence of google fanbois does not disprove the existence of iPhone fanbois.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.