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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.
So how is this developer's desire to port something from Android to the iPhone and advertise it different from Apple's desire to have Windows applications running on OSX and actively advertise it?
Oh, now I get it. You push the little guys around when you're the big man on campus. Certainly is interesting I can find literature about Symbian on your site. Tell me, if a very popular Symbian or Blackberry app was ported to the iPhone, would you allow the developer to advertise it? Because I'm betting you would.
My work here is dung.
I don't see this guy mentioning that his application was a finalist in a developer challenge as such.
If anything it makes it stand out...
Gee, how did Apple find out in the sea of 5,000 applications that turn your phone into a flashlight?
They probably search for 'android' and snuff the mention of it out.
It is their store.... they can do what they want and for that reason I don't buy from it.
I have seen tons of apps on the android store that mention iPhone or the fact that the same application was written for it.
We don't see Google snuffing those out....
This Apple has worms in it.
Yes, it does depend on what company does it. Anti-competitive behavior is legal until you're a monopoly, then its not. Doing things to undermine the competition is perfectly competitive until you're in a position where there is no more serious competition left in the market. Also, please be advised that the app store isn't the whole of "the market," the app store is apple's contribution to the market.
I wonder how a game where an archer (who just happens to look like a certain Android) shoots an Apple (that just happens to have a bite taken out of it) off of it's pedestal would be received? Hrmmmm...
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Right, they don't want their devlopers to realize that Google encourages and rewards outstanding developers.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I've had it explained to me that it makes much more sense to build the metadata index on a powerful PC, rather than building the functionality into each mp3 player.
My $40 sandisk indexes a couple of gigabytes in about 10 seconds, so I scratched my head too.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I use Media Monkey and it does sync the iPod Touch... kind of.
First, it only syncs music, not apps. (duh)
More importantly, though, it seems like the sync is buggy as hell. I don't even try to use my iPod Touch to play music anymore, because it rarely goes more than three or four tracks without locking up and becoming unresponsive for a good minute or so, before finally failing to play the next song and giving up. Basically all I use the iPod Touch for now is as an authenticator for WoW and occasionally to listen to podcasts in the car.
Also worth mentioning that for MM to sync the iPod Touch, you need to have iTunes installed... And a very, very specific version of iTunes at that.
would you have preferred them to have rejected the app outright instead?
An outright, written rejection on the grounds of mentioning the competition may be seen by lawyers as grounds for a lawsuit.
Obviously he didn't hate them until he experienced the product.
After years of disinterest in Apple, I finally bought my wife an iPod because the treadmills at our gym have their crummy prioprietary dock. So I caved, and bought an iPod. And guess what, it still didn't work! Turns out Apple locked down the video output on newer models so they could control the sale of accessories, like $45 video-out cables. So I sold the new iPod on ebay, and bought an older iPod Video that works with the treadmill. It'll be a long time until I buy another Apple product in the absence of further coercion.
You can. They tried really hard, not just by using proprietary everything but also using ridiculously obfuscated crypto, but we broke it again. No jailbreaking needed.
For those who love magic 16-byte keys, the magic "freedom for Apple music players" number this time around is 618ca10dc7f57fd3b4723e08157463d7 ;)
Actually, Android phones have been able to work around the issue without requiring a new protocol or any specific, non-standard sync application.
They simply expose some partition through USB as a block device, but the partition is unmounted by the embedded OS before being handled to the USB host. From the host point of view, the device is like a removable disk drive, and when the user chooses to switch the partition to the PC side, it's like if someone just inserted a disk in the removable drive.
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.
that's like saying "if you open a restaurant, and don't allow anyone to eat there, that's legal. so if you open a restaurant, and only allow white people to eat there, that should be legal too." now, you may or may not be right about apple's practices being legal, but your argument is, IMHO, invalid, as i tried to demonstrate through that analogy.
(btw, "idiot" is one of those pesky little words that, when used in an argument to attack the opponent, says much more about the person that said it than anyone else)
weinersmith