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Opera Mini Not Rejected From iPhone (Yet)
danaris writes in to inform us that John Gruber has done some digging on the reported rejection from the App Store of Opera Mini, and has written up his findings. Some choice excerpts: "My understanding, based on information from informed sources who do not wish to be identified because they were not authorized by their employers, is that Opera has developed an iPhone version of Opera Mini — but they haven't even submitted it to Apple, let alone had it be rejected. ... If what they've done for the iPhone is [to get] a Java ME runtime running on the iPhone — it's clearly outside the bounds of the iPhone SDK Agreement. ... What Opera would need to do to have a version of Opera Mini they could submit to the App Store would be to port the entire client software to the C and Objective-C APIs officially supported on the iPhone. It could well be that even then, Apple would reject it from the App Store on anti-competitive grounds — but contrary to this week's speculation, that has not happened."
...would they port the JavaME version? Doesn't that seem a bit circuitous when Apple provides a sophisticated toolkit to compile their Mac codebase down? It's not like the iPhone is underpowered.
Something doesn't quite seem right here.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Why exactly is Apple worried about people making different browsers/media players for the iPhone/iPod touch? They already paid the ~$250 for Safari/iPod player so why does it matter if they want to use VLC instead and use Opera to browse? They bought the hardware. I could understand them rejecting such projects as an Amazon MP3 store or something, but media players and browsers? Come on Apple, we already gave you our $$$ for that.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Or.. It _could_ be that the Opera rep is just stating something which no one can verify. In the end Opera gets goodwill and great press while Apple gets the opposite. Opera has allegedly built cool stuff which and Apple probably would have rejected. Either way.. FUD and vapor all over.
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
There's no question that Apple's iPhone/iPod touch behavior is anti-competitive. As Apple gains market power, rising toward #1 in the smartphone market, such behavior might also be illegal in at least some jurisdictions. Apple needs to tread very carefully here.
No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s).
On an unrelated note, I wish Apple would spend less time making absurd rules like that and more time making their developer site actually work. It took me nearly 20 minutes just to manage to log in to view the SDK Agreement.
Slashdot is getting more FUD and hate-articles lately, might that be? First announcing something bad about a company, practically begging for hating/dissociating posts, then clearing it with articles like this? At least we discussed ... very insightful. I used to like posts that point out the FUD about companies and poke at flaws and inaccuracy in articles, evidence and arguments.
This topic earlier
In between: Have we discussed how awesome the new Ubuntu is often enough?
Mod this troll.
Granted, he did ask that his post be modded troll, but it really isn't. Perhaps he picked a poor example. Here's another.
From the summary:
The folks at O'Reilly Media aren't immune, so they set out to discover just what is it about iPhones that makes them such bad RF citizens.
Cute. Lots of phones are 'bad RF citizens', but gee, this sounds like the iPhone is special in this regard, right?
More from the summary:
The iPhones aren't the only bad apples in the cell phone basket and there's not much you can do about the problem.
So... lots of cell phones create RF interference in some devices. Did that make article make it to Slashdot because of the interesting topic of RF interferrence, or did the line about the iPhone not being a good RF citizen cause it to be approved? Did both of the Opera stories make it without the words "Apple rejected..."?
It's fashionable to smack Apple around, but seriously, it's not like the AC was wrong.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
The article says...
That's totally different from saying it was rejected. It may well be the case that they read Apple's agreement and understood that Apple would not allow them to release it... and thus they didn't need to submit it.
In the same way, I already know that the US Government will not allow me to sell marijuana-laced brownies. I don't need to apply to the FDA to find that out, since it's already well understood from the law.
I'm surprised nobody pointed this out earlier.
It's about Opera having thought of a innovative way to get a browsing-experience into a phone where (apart from the screensize) the network is a bottleneck. Doing the browsing at the server-end, transferring images to a phone instead of HTML is kind of elegant and, given that you trust the provider to anonimize you, can even have nice privacy implications; you can parse text from HTML, but you can't parse text from an image easily.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Much of John Gruber's site is an apology journal for Apple's less reasonable activity. When he doesn't have a concrete argument, he resorts to specious hand-waving; when his hands are tired out, he resorts to whispers from "sources". He's the worst sort of evangelist - he's on full warp not when he's giving praise for Apple, but when he's insulting some individual or group he disagrees with.
I am typing this from my primary workstation, an iMac. I think OS X is a fine mainstream operating system. But I don't think Apple are a particularly stellar corporation. I heartily recommend people actually read a few articles from Gruber's daringfireball.net to analyse the fallacies in his reasoning otherwise. Frustrated by his words, you may wish to respond on his site, but be warned: like any zealot, he sees opposition as justification for his mission. At best, you'll be ignored; at worst, something you say will be the subject of a mocking article.
An practitioner earns his reputation in some field - as genius, mediocre, or buffoon - and Gruber has, by his site, earnt the third label.
If what they've done for the iPhone is [to get] a Java ME runtime running on the iPhone
Opera Mini has already been ported to non-Java version(s), stated by haavard here, referring to a Opera press release from as far back as 2007. Gruber speculates that it's because a JavaScript intepreter would clearly break with the SDK Agreement, however as seen in this interview, Opera Mini doesn't have to interpret JavaScript at all, nor render web pages - this can all be done on the servers.
Hmm... this would be the same Gruber who wrote that the App Store's exclusion of applications which "compete with" Apple's own offerings is "seriously wrong"? The one who said (same link) that "[i]f this is truly Apple's policy, it's a disaster for the platform"? The same Gruber who said, of Apple's policies, "they shouldn't be doing this"? The same Gruber who said of Apple's inscrutable rejections of applications which violate no SDK guidelines that "[r]ules you disagree with are frustrating. Rules you don't know about are scary"?
Is that the Gruber you're talking about here?
Well, suffice it to say that people have a variety of opinions on this. I bought an iPhone (mainly due to some work-related reasons).
Safari, and the lack of an Opera option, were the main reason I really wanted to go with a Blackberry and NOT buy the iPhone. IMHO, Safari is great for making iPhone commercials that look cool, but in terms of usability, it has some serious problems, mainly that you cannot change the size of the text, independent of the layout. So, if I zoom in to make the text readable, then I have to constantly scroll right, and then left, and then right, and then left, and then right, and so on. Opera handles this much more gracefully, albeit with less glamour. Another problem with Safari on iPhone is that it crashes every few minutes. It is extremely unstable. Furthermore, Safari on iPhone doesn't let me sync my bookmarks and other things that would be awfully nice to have on iPhone.
I'm happy if you (and others) enjoy Safari and don't think these shortcomings are important to you, but personally I'd love to have some viable option, preferably Opera.