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Apple Removes Wi-Fi Finders From App Store
jasonbrown writes "Apple on Thursday began removing another category of apps from its iPhone App Store. This time, it's not porn, it's Wi-Fi. Apple removed several Wi-Fi apps commonly referred to as stumblers, or apps that seek out available Wi-Fi networks near your location. According to a story on Cult of Mac, apps removed by Apple include WiFi-Where, WiFiFoFum, and yFy Network Finder."
for the win.
if you wanted options, you would have gone android... fucksticks.
What does Apple gain by removing these things?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I think this is called pissing in the well from which you drink. I really don't get why Apple is trying so hard to alienate developers. / Android user
garethw
I'm so glad you make all the hard decisions for me! Would you like to cast my next vote for me?? Oh yeah, when I actually succumb to mobile devices they will be open. This is like Microsoft telling you what software you can install on Windows! Is this the future? Twenty years from now Mac's will only be able to get applications from Apple's approved store? Yeah, I'm not gonna help with that.
Shh.
There are technical measures Apple can take to prevent applications from using private frameworks. But Apple doesn't use that approach.
This whole issue smells like selective enforcement of Kafkaesque ever-shifting, secret rules against applications Apple needs an excuse to remove.
Is Apple actively trying to destroy any developer relationship that they had, and are they trying to show the community that they are not up to the challenge of hosting an app store?
No, they're just trying to show their users that they have total control. Just to remind you. In case you forgot.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
It can be said that it is Kafkaesque when a reason isn't given but others with the same capabilities are allowed.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
This is great news !! This is the only way developers and users will learn never to trust a closed platform. Hopefully this starts pissing people off enough to go towards Android, or preferably the only truly open smartphone OS : Maemo / Meego. So I say, please Apple, remove more useful apps !!
How are programs that provide superior functionality 'clutter' by any definition of the word?
Sadly this critical part of the story is being submerged under the usual "Apple is the great Satan" Slashdot groupthink. It seems to be an easy road to be modded up if a poster makes a short criticism of Apple, even if they don't know any of the facts.
Hey, I know!
Since nobody on Slashdot knows a single thing about this action by Apple -- at this moment -- why don't we just post a bunch of shit that has absolutely no merit?! Hey, we can even call ourselves "journalists"!
So... you take the good with the bad. Without Jobs, or someone like him who is actually passionate about making a product HE would like to use, apple would (and almost did) die.
I am wondering what's going to happen when he retired, which surely isn't that far off...
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Oh what a difference a few decades make.
Bye!
Can you honestly say that with a straight face while browsing the hundreds of fart apps and stupid slideshows of 5 pictures or less? The App store is indeed cluttered by tens of thousands of utterly useless and worthless apps, but the Wi-Fi finding category is certainly not contributing by much.
Best idea ever Apple.
It makes me even more proud to be a PC.
"The Castle" arguably qualifies as well.
How else do you explain it? If Apple did not care about the function it would leave the app's as they were, if it did care about the function it would include it in the public frameworks?
Function is the common denominator in the revoked applications, to try and say it they were retroactively revoked due to some QA seems absurd due to the fact that only applications with a specific function were targeted . It seems failing to make that particular assumption is like not being able to put two and two together (be careful with Occam's razor, it's sharp).
You don't seem to understand WHY programming interfaces are labeled public and private, or stable and unstable.
If they cared about the functionality, they could whip up a technical means of restricting access. Private interfaces are private because they might not be formally documented, designed or committed to. What's private now might be made public later if there is enough demand for it and the design is solid. If they liked the design of it, it would probably already be a public interface though...
I don't know why Apple isn't picking these things up sooner, maybe they know but revoke apps only when a particular interface is about to change?
It doesn't matter how they do it, using private/unstable interfaces is gamble any way you cut it.
No, other apps that do the same thing are still allowed and available in the app store.
As far as I can tell, these other apps don't scan actively for access points. That is, they don't use the private framework.
(on Mac OS X, you need to use the private Apple80211.framework, not sure about iPhone OS X).
No you don't.
Yes, you do.
That is, unless you want to rewrite the portion of the Darwin kernel that interfaces with the plethora of wireless network devices that Mac OS X is designed to handle, and provide support for that, all for your wifi stumbler or whatever. The option is always open to roll your own code, even in these cases on the iPhone. Sometimes, though, that option is just stupid.
Unlike with iPhones and iPads, with their crippled phoneOS, I can use any framework I want that I can install on my MacBook Pro.
The iPhone OS is far from crippled. It's a full UNIX running on a phone, with a full-featured Apple Objective-C runtime, with a snazzy custom multitouch UI. The sandbox and features given to developers through the official Apple program is crippled. The OS is not.
To be pedantic, as well, you can use any framework you want that you can install on your iPhone as well. You may have to jailbreak it to get write access to the frameworks, but you can still use it once it's on there.
Very mature.
Apple's corporate nannyism is indeed a pain, and it's what keeps me away from iPhone. But I can't say I like Android any better. It's the usual disorganized Google product, where every product is viewed as emergent from a lot of independent programmers each doing their own thing. So there's no central vision to the product. You have a total mess of a platform that isn't even a single platform, since every Android hardware implementation is different from every other.
Really, our choices suck. Maemo (or whatever it's called now) will never achieve critical mass. Windows Moblle is, well, Windows. Symbian is showing its age. Blackberry is designed for somebody who texts a lot more than I do.
I'm sort of flirting with getting a WebOS phone, except I don't trust Palm not to screw this product up, the way they've screwed up every other product. Also, a phone plan that supports it properly costs $60/month (3G data rates in the U.S. are totally out of hand), and while I like having the Internet in my pocket, I'm not sure I like it that much.
What I should really do is go back to having a separate phone and PDA, and put up with the hassle of sharing data between them manually. (With a PAYG plan, I'd probably save $50/month.) Except nobody makes a decent PDA any more...
The iPhone OS is far from crippled. It's a full UNIX running on a phone, with a full-featured Apple Objective-C runtime, with a snazzy custom multitouch UI. The sandbox and features given to developers through the official Apple program is crippled. The OS is not.
If I can not install whatever software on my equipment and instead have to use the app store then it is crippled. If I don't do what I want on it that I can do on my Mac then it is crippled.
To be pedantic, as well, you can use any framework you want that you can install on your iPhone as well. You may have to jailbreak it to get write access to the frameworks, but you can still use it once it's on there.
But I don't have to jailbreak my Mac. Heck I've even got assistance from Apple store genuses to set up my Mac to dual boot Ubuntu. What I have been told at a store though is that they can not help me with developer uses, instead I'm referred to the Apple Developer Connection.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I'm not sure why anyone would develop for the iPhone, apparently you not only face a capricious approval process, but they may revoke that approval on a whim.
Just make sure your app complies with all current and future rules and does not compete against any apps Apple plans to introduce down the line, and you'll be fine.
Want to invest in my iPhone dev business?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Your user number is low enough for you to have been here when /. blew up about Microsoft using internal APIs that no one else knew about. IIRC such actions got them in a little bit of legal trouble.
But since it is apple we are perfectly happy with letting apple tell us what we can and can't do with our own hardware.
Bet you are a BIG FSF / GPL support though.
Why do they need to protect me from maintaining my app? If I use an API and they do something that breaks it, it's my responsibility to fix it or they pull the app.
If it's an officially documented API, that is not the case, at least not with Mac OS X (and, as far as I know, with other commercial UN*Xes and Windows). People generally get peeved if updating the OS breaks an app, and the first organization to which they complain is likely to be the OS vendor, so the OS vendor makes at least some effort not to break APIs. I think Raymond Chen has talked about this at Microsoft, and it's also an issue at Apple (try doing nm -p /usr/lib/libSystem.dylib | egrep '\$' on OS X - at least in newer versions, you'll find multiple versions of some APIs, so that the API can be changed without breaking binary compatibility with older apps).
Does the iPhone OS SDK say otherwise? Does it explicitly say that, if any app works on version N and fails to work on version N+1, it's ipso facto the app developer's fault?
If the issue is that the Apps used a private API, how did they get approved in the first place?
Because over time Apple gets better about figuring out who is using private API's.
In the early days it was the most egregious violations that visually screamed out "hey look, I am using a private API" - like Coverflow.
So then that died down, and for a while people got away with undocumented framework and system calls.
But recently Apple has started basically using a symbol analyses tool looking for calls to specific system stuff. I can imagine it was only recently they thought to look at super low level network stuff.
Apple even has been pretty nice about it generally, most developers just get a warning saying "you are using a private API, fix that before your next update please". I guess whatever this framework was using was a little more undesirable than most calls.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It could be argued that Apple is trying to maintain their developer relationship. I have an app idea, and I know I can't write it without using a private framework or API. So I stick my idea back on the shelf and go work on something else. But then I see other apps with similar functionality, and I know they didn't do it while playing by the rules. At that point I'm a little irked at Apple when the rules apparently don't apply evenly.
That's not hypothetical, it's happened to me. The Red Laser app used the exact API I needed to use. They get to submit something that becomes best-selling, I didn't bother even creating a new project file. Later, instead of yanking Red Laser, Apple changes their mind and says, "umm, okay, go ahead and use the API". In the end, it's the better thing for Apple to do. Doesn't make me feel better about losing lead time.
Happens every time and even though the intelligent users of slashdot are more than aware of this, they can't seem to fight the compulsion to re-re-re-re-state their position/perception/opinion on the matter.
Apple strong on consistent user experience. (by this I mean consistent with apple's ever-changing idea of what the user experience should be.)
Android strong on openness and flexibility. (except for where the carriers object and attempt to control it... but even then, not so much.)
When the iPhone came out with a battery that couldn't be replaced by the user, I wrote it off. To me, that was the primary show-stopper. It's a privacy and security concern. It's a battery life/conservation concern. It's even a safety concern.
Android, on the other hand is interesting in that it is yet another high profile Linux based product that has elements of traditional Linux failure all over it. I don't mean this to sound as bad as it sounds, but I can think of no better way to put it. The game isn't over yet and perhaps the people steering Android will see the failures and find some solutions, but what traditional failures am I talking about? Simple: "Being strong on consistent user experience" among other things.
Previous articles on slashdot came close to describing problems by talking about the wide variety of android phones and how software for one does not work for all. (it's not a problem for normal Linux hackers... we know all about tarballs, DEBs and RPMS, i386/i586/i686/x86_64/PPC and other divisions based on which version of glibc it was compiled for.) But there is more. The apps themselves are "more free" and therefore have less consistent delivery of look and feel. When this happens, a solid device starts to feel like a handful of marbles. At some level of consciousness, we all perceive problems when we are presented with things that don't match up well. Whether or not it's an actual problem is irrelevant to the feelings of the user (which, by the way is foremost on the minds at Apple) which is where the real success or failure of a project lies. "Better things" fail all the time at the hands of better marketing of lesser things. If people feel one thing is better than another or more reliable or will last longer or be supported longer or will have better backing, the truth doesn't matter so much as their feelings.
As a Linux optimist, I see this as an opportunity for Linux to gain recognition and public favor. We all know that Linux is a kernel and that it's in a LOT of stuff everywhere that most people never see or think about. We also know that because it's just a kernel, the REAL problems are in how it's packaged with other things... with or without a GUI, which GUI, what package management, etc. But there's more. Look and feel has never really been stressed. KDE users will probably disagree with me on this because KDE does, in fact, push more in favor of a consistent look and feel. But they are an exception.
But even if the Android project pulls itself together and actually does build a very successful consumer implementation of a Linux based OS, it can't quite be said "It's good because it's Linux." It would still be more accurate to say "It's good in spite of being Linux" because at the moment, a successful consumer Linux OS doesn't fix all the others that we know and love.
ergonomic btw is not "easy-to-use", look it up) No multitasking.
You're telling me to "look up" ergonomic, then claiming it means "multitasking"?
Since you are so keen on "looking up" things, lets look at the actual definition:
"The applied science of equipment design, as for the workplace, intended to maximize productivity by reducing operator fatigue and discomfort. Also called biotechnology, human engineering, human factors engineering."
Please enlighten us as to how the kinds of multitasking not allowed by third party iPhone apps (because the iPhone does support multitasking, and some form of that for third party apps) help in those regards.
Not that the Android UI is perfect, but you'll notice it's problems are related more to polish, and not to fundamental decisions early on.
Actually both, like the mandate of the Four buttons being a fundamental design mistake at the outset. Really kills an Android tablet. Apple made many more intelligent design choices up front and over time they are reaping the benefit of that.
Because the thing you are missing, is that the ONLY limitations the iPhone really has are things Apple can simply REMOVE from the system. That is the real secret, Apple can allow something to work when they feel like they have how it should work well thought out. The fact that you can do anything with a jailbroken iPhone you can with Android shows this to be true. You can already do more things with an iPhone today than you could at launch, Apple simply opens the platform more slowly but also more thoughtfully.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley