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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.
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.
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).