Apple May Face Antitrust Inquiry

suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from the NY Post: "According to a person familiar with the matter, the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission are locked in negotiations over which of the watchdogs will begin an antitrust inquiry into Apple's new policy of requiring software developers who devise applications for devices such as the iPhone and iPad to use only Apple's programming tools. Regulators, this person said, are days away from making a decision about which agency will launch the inquiry. It will focus on whether the policy, which took effect last month, kills competition by forcing programmers to choose between developing apps that can run only on Apple gizmos or come up with apps that are platform-neutral, and can be used on a variety of operating systems, such as those from rivals Google, Microsoft, and Research In Motion. An inquiry doesn't necessarily mean action will be taken against Apple, which argues the rule is in place to ensure the quality of the apps it sells to customers. Typically, regulators initiate inquiries to determine whether a full-fledged investigation ought to be launched. If the inquiry escalates to an investigation, the agency handling the matter would issue Apple a subpoena seeking information about the policy."

Comments

Re:Tying

[mikael_j]

Ah yes, because the "experts" never make mistakes or do counterproductive things just to get attention (and the advantages that may come with this attention)?

Re:[sigh]

[coolgeek]

That's a pretty myopic view. Other app translation layers are going to be knocked out of the market too.

I've been writing code for a very long time. Twenty seven years. I have seen similar restrictions. You can't develop for a game console without using the certified tools from the console vendor, and paying out the ass for the privilege. Prior to the iPhone, there were plenty of phones and platforms with even more draconian restrictions. Any app for any phone on Verizon Wireless required code to be written in Java.

And I'll say it: god damn right this is a good thing. What I have seen in my multiple decades in this industry is layer upon layer of bloat added and added and added to each successive version of a package or OS. Even Linux suffers from this, albeit to a much lesser extent than some "other" operating systems.

The answer for most of the software industry has consistently been: throw more hardware at the problem. The end result: people get hardly any value for buying a new computer. It's about fucking time some OS vendor drew the line and said "if you use cycle burning bloatware, you're not welcome here". I think it would be a damn good thing if all OS vendors took the same attitude. But of course, they would have to lead by example...which Apple has done. Snow Leopard is the first OS release in the past 3 decades that delivered more features than its predecessor, and did it with a smaller footprint, and with tighter, faster code. So, for $29, I got a better computer upgrade than any I have spent $800-$4000 for in the past. And my upgrades have spanned all microcomputer platforms except BeOS.

Bottom line: Man the fuck up and write some decent code. If you're any good at it, your core logic is layered away from where it touches the OS and it's APIs anyway, so porting your iPhone app to another platform isn't much of an issue anyway. Unless the other target platform restricts you to Java.