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Mentioning Android Is a No-No In iPhone App Store
donberryman writes "Apple has told a software developer that its application cannot be included in the iPhone App Store if it mentions Google Android. The developer just wanted to mention that the app was a finalist in Google's Android Developer's Challenge." The developer complied with apparent good humor. Here is their blog post, which includes the text of the iPhone store's not-quite-rejection.
You clicked through and made 2 root level comments. That doesn't speak to you trying to ignore it.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
And what kills me is that all of the iPhone limitations are caused by Apple being shitty company. Seriously, Apple, why the fuck can't I sync my iPod Touch on Linux? It's not that nobody is willing to make a program to do it; its that Apple went out of their way to make this impossible. It's the first and last Apple product I'll ever make the mistake of buying.
I was rather irritated to find that my nice, new 16GB iPod Touch, shiny and gorgeous and amazing as it is, does not present as a USB mass storage device, unlike pretty-much every other mp3 player including most iPods to date. Great, so now I need to carry a USB memory stick with me as well? Thanks Apple.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
the point of the removal isn't the word Android, or Google, but the whole phrase of Google Android Developer Contest.
That's not what Apple's response says at all:
we found that your application contains inappropriate or irrelevant platform information in the Application Description and/or Release Notes sections ... Providing future platform compatibility plans or other general platform references are not relevant in the context of the iPhone App Store.
So, yes, this is about Android as a whole, not just the contest.
You can use libimobiledevice and ifuse to mount your iPod Touch under Linux, if that's all you need. You can use it as a generic mass storage device (no need to jailbreak either) as long as you have these tools.
For what it's worth, I understand Apple's decision on this regard. There is a void in USB regarding smart devices with onboard filesystem drivers which run an OS. Basically, there's no USB File Transfer Protocol, just raw block-device USB Mass Storage (which is useless for devices that run their own OS and can't just expose a block device - not to mention that iPhone OS devices use HFS, not FAT). There's a Picture Transfer Protocol for digital cameras, and Apple does support that, but only for pictures. They made their own protocol for the other stuff. Really, iPod Touch devices aren't music players, they're embedded computers with an OS which you just happen to be able to play music on, and there's no standard "USB file transfer between OSes" protocol.
What is inexcusable is their insistence in trying to cryptographically stop people from syncing their iPods and iPhones with third-party software. But this is one layer above, and it affects the music database. The underlying nonstandard USB protocol was a practical necessity (although, incidentally, their implementation is horrid).
My Android phone has no problem supporting both Microsoft's Media Player sync and mounting as a mass storage device...and I happily would consider it more than just a music player too.
Unstable Apps: Our Android Apps Don't Suck
You guys have it all wrong. This is a good thing. Apple isn't competing with Google. They are just trying to protect users from malware apps that turn users into evil androids! Have you people not seen Blade Runner?
No USB protocol for smart devices... Um, no...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Transfer_Protocol
Would work just fine for the data that the iPod supports.
So, that's not a good excuse for Apple causing this much pain. MTP could be added in a firmware update. And, the check-file updating could be done on the device if the MTP path is chosen. Yes, MTP users may be disadvantaged (by synching more slowly), but (for me anyway) it would beat having to start Windows XP(tm) in a virtual machines, and then launching iTunes.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
It's kind of silly that the phone is unable to access the files in the partition while they're being accessed by the PC, but nonetheless, I think it's a cleaner solution.
It's not silly at all. When the PC has block-level access, the OS assumes its file system driver has sole control over that partition. This is, at the very least, true of NTFS (and wouldn't be an unreasonable assumption for most file system drivers).
If they made it so that the phone and the PC could both access the partition, there would have to be provisions for simultaneous changes/writes, syncing issues when both systems load the same file, and many of the other complications you see with network shares.
It's far simpler to lock the partition for whatever system is using it than to deal with all the edge cases where simultaneous use can cause the loss, desyncing, or corruption of data.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.