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Apple Blocks iOS Apps Using Dropbox SDK
Barence writes with an excerpt from PC Pro: "Dropbox's latest SDK has incurred the wrath of Apple, because users who don't have the Dropbox app installed on their iPhone/iPad are instead pushed to Dropbox's website via the Safari browser. Here, they can click a link to the desktop version of the service, which allows them to buy extra Dropbox storage without Apple taking its usual 30% cut."
Reportedly, Dropbox is attempting to strike a deal to resolve the problem.
How dare Apple disallow someone not following the rules.
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
What's to stop an iP* user going directly to the dropbox website anyway?
Burns: We're building a casino!
McAllister: Arrr. Give me 5 minutes.
No, Apple did not use the Dropbox SDK to block apps,
Apple blocked iOS Apps that use Dropbox SDK.
1. Do not talk about iOS club.
2. Do not compete with services offered by Apple.
3. Do NOT TALK ABOUT iOS CLUB!
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
I hope they don't go after existing apps. Now I'm afraid to update anything. If all Dropbox enabled apps suddenly vanished or lost syncing ability I'm pretty sure there's be riots in the streets.
What happened at the end of the summary there?
Was the editor suddenly consumed with rage?
This is why I don't publish an app for my web services. Safari's rich enough for an appropriately formatted and scripted web interface, and it avoids the 30% haircut.
More of a concern is that one of the rejections was due to the following: "Specifically, your app enables to user to create accounts with Dropbox and Google." (Apple's own words in the rejection notice). Thus can we expect any app that contains the ability to create an account / sign up for an account with any service to be rejected?
i bet this is the last straw that will send everyone to android
apple will be like RIM by this time next year
What's wrong with that? The users don't have the app on their iPhone, so they are taken to the company's website. Is that so horrible? That's how every other browser in the world works. Are Apple phone/padd users now verboten from visiting company websites?
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
I think we need an offshoot of the The Fuckwad Theory.
Enough Market Share + Enough Fawning Press Attention on Devices + Gobs of Cash = Corporate Fuckwad.
Seems to be true of Google to some extent, too.
Now fucking sleep in it.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Why hasn't Apple run afoul of anti-trust laws?
Surely their behavior is anticompetitive.
This is why I don't publish an app for my web services.
What problems have you run into while making sure that there is enough HTML5 application cache and HTML5 local storage to fit all the resources that your application needs when the web services are used offline? Or are people who commonly use applications offline (e.g. iPod touch or iPad while on a bus) not part of your target demographic?
This article is completely wrong.
The word SDK is used improperly, and what Apple is complaining about is not at all what the article states. It sickens me that articles like this reinstill false ideas of what and why Apple does things.
Simply put, Apple's policy is that for any app in the appstore, if you desire someone to purchase additional features for your app, and you tell them about it, they must be done through in-app purchases. DropBox is not doing this. It's completely okay according to Apple for the DropBox app to not say anything about buying additional storage, and then selling this additional storage on their website, but it is NOT okay according to Apple to tell the user inside the app about this additional storage, and then bypassing Apple's in-app purchase system and giving the user a link to the website.
I know that a shopper could always choose to go another platform (Android, RIM, Microsoft, etc.), but at what point will there be sufficient incentive to allow for this behavior to be investigated as anti-competitive? Apple controls the only marketplace on their very popular platform, and is using that control to dictate how other companies do business and reach out to customers who are on that platform. Microsoft tried to do something vaguely similar in the late 90s and got called out for it. At what point do our current antitrust legislation come into effect? Is it a matter of platform market-share? Perhaps somebody with a greater understanding than I could enlighten me.
You buy something off Amazon on your ipad , Apple should get a 30% cut, same with any purchase as really it is the same as dropbox
30% of the gross is ridiculous. I don't know how anyone thinks they can build a business on that. Perhaps a few are able to do it but the risk is so high.
This is the kind of disgusting money grabbing that makes me glad I have never owned an apple product, and never will.
And having an application Apple says disobeys their ToS isn't a criminal charge.
"How come you don't have an iPhone?" and "Why do you use Linux?".....
This seems a bit like the mafia - Dropbox tried to circumvent the rules of protection, or make money off the books, and hence will have to be taxed...
It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.
It feels good to be living in freedom... you're all welcome to join.
Welcomed Google to the Smart Phone market place? http://www.slashgear.com/apple-releases-full-page-welcome-to-ibm-30-years-ago-yesterday-13171586/#entrycontent
If you aren't part of the solution, then there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
I'm sick of having to download hundreds of needless apps whose functionality could have been performed in Safari.
It's getting ridiculous: "Honey, how many pages of apps do I have to scroll through until I get to the one that displays the tensile strength of Reebok shoelaces?"
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Fuck Apple.
Nope. Buy something through a web site and Apple gets nothing.
But if a 3rd party developer's app sells you something, Apple gets a cut.
So anybody can go to Dropbox's web site on their iDevice and sign up for Dropbox and buy additional storage, but individual apps are not allowed to sell Dropbox directly without giving Apple a cut.
This is of course only a minor inconvenience to the user, who can set up Dropbox using Safari, and then access his Dropbox through any number of apps that support Dropbox access.
Come on, Apple fans! WAKE UP and recognize that Apple is going to do everything possible to make money, even if that means inconveniencing it's own users! If you are affected by this, I would say it's high time you dump your Apple products and buy into a platform that lets you load the software you want without having a corporate overlord approve it first! (cough, Android, cough!)
If an app I am using gets pulled from the Market (and I know it's a trusted developer...this is important!), then I just go to their webpage and download the app directly from them. I am not forced into getting my apps just from one source. If you ARE forced to get your apps from one place, with one company dictating what you can and can not have access to, then maybe it's time you re-asses your loyalties.
I've pointed this out before and I'm sure I will again, but this isn't just greed on Apple's part. A lot of iPhone users think every app on their phone was somehow written by Apple and is supported by Apple. They also expect Apple to fix all their problems including billing issues, which simply isn't possible unless the transactions went through Apple in the first place. Obviously by definition people who read /. are going to be well aware that apps are written by other people and companies and that support should go to them. The average consumer though really does think the Apple logo on the back means everything on it is Apple. Same if it was a Windows logo, it must all be Microsoft. This is a huge support problem, and telling customers "Sorry that's not our fault, call this other company..." is NEVER a good way to keep a customer.
That Apple has yet to be brought up on charges of anti-trust and extortion?
Apple's iOS App Store rules state that all in-app purchases must use the In-app purchase mechanism. In addition, you cannot link to an external purchase mechanism. Finally, Apple charges their standard 30% fee for purchases for in-app purchasing.
The issue in the Dropbox SDK is that it fires up a web view for authentication, and the page it went to was not properly sandboxed. By creating an account, then clicking a link to go to the desktop version, you got to a page that let you pay to upgrade to a pro version. At this point, it broke the rule above. Since this was functionality within the SDK, all the applications being submitted to the store using this version of the SDK are breaking this rule and getting rejected.
My guess is Dropbox released a new SDK version that sends the user to a different web page for authentication, this one being properly sandboxed. I do not know what Dropbox would be talking to Apple about; unless Dropbox API support is added to the OS, you would need the Dropbox client installed in order to be able to even support in-app purchasing of a pro account.
... scripted web interface ...
This is why I don't use your web services.
How would you recommend making a web application that works offline with no script?
Apple's original intention was for iOS to only run web apps.
Under the original plan, what sort of JavaScript API would web applications running under iOS have used to access the accelerometer, speaker, microphone, and camera of the device?
Apple deserves nothing!
Richard S Wheeler is author of "Second Lives", a collection of stories about people who's lives change drastically after some major loss.
Lorenzo Carthage was a mining developer who made and lost fortunes. In his story, he has just lost everything and has had to take a degrading job processing ore just to feed himself. His clothes have been stolen and he cannot even visit his former business associates because he looks like a bum.
But he gets a chance because HAW Tabor agrees to back his latest gold mining idea. He's back on top, the money is flowing and his employees are digging their little hearts out.
And the closer it gets to the opening of the mine, the more Lorenzo takes advantage of his employees. He cuts their wages drastically and more or less announces that once the gold mine is open, there will be even deeper cuts.
And just before the mine is due to open, the miners remember where they stored the excess dynamite. They blow the hell out of the mine and there is no way it can ever be dug out again.
Lorenzo goes insane and becomes incapable of acknowledging that his money is gone. He writes bad checks, and many merchants and restaurants accept them, even knowing they were worthless.
(In California, there was a real person known as "the Emperor Norton" who actually did this, and people accepted those checks because he was charming and in a perverse way entertaining.)
I always expected Steve Jobs to wind up as a kind of Emperor Norton. He was a "control freak" who created Apple and almost sunk it back in the 1980s. Having gotten a new chance, it was obvious that in 30 years he had never learned a thing. I expected Apple to once again wind up with a 10% market share because of his policies.
It's not a matter of hating Apple. People have an innate awareness of what is fair. Beyond a certain point people not only refuse to do business with an unfair company, they become willing to do whatever it takes to insure that cheaters never prosper.
Now that Jobs is gone, it is possible that Apple will learn something as a company - but I wouldn't count on it.
When you are dancing with wolves, never limp
Apple should screw them over and do something like the Dropbox front end, only with some security and reliablity instead of an epic fail with less security than 20 year old vanilla FTP and less useful anonymously than bittorrent.
Face it guys, it's just a well polished turd that only exists because Apple and Microsoft never bothered to have their own easy to use built in application for secure file transfer.
It's truly depressing that the free web space your ISP would have given you in 1995 and FTP to transfer it would be even more secure than dropbox today. You still have the disadvantage with both that when you give access to somebody they can see everything - but with the old FTP you could revoke access later by changing your password. Dropbox gives you the illusion of being able to do that, but doesn't! The password changes but not the key. That's a truly epic failure that makes the thing a danger in the workplace where dropbox could embarrassingly be a vector of sharing information between competing clients. Then there's the HUGE fuckups where anybody could get in without a password or key and similar incidents. They are clowns, worse than dozens of competing options and far less secure than something almost universal twenty years ago. They just have more hype and PR than the other stuff that works.
Your store sells a video game published by say EA that has an online component with a monthly registration fee. You don't get a cut of the online component, just a cut of the game. In fact, it would be patently unfair for you to call up EA and demand a cut of the online registration fee, just because the game was sold in your store. It is completely separate and external.
"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." George Bernard Shaw
Talk about putting as carrot before a donkey, this is apple just putting Apple before sheep! As with everything Apple, it's our way, our money and most of all our profit that matters and as long as people follow them like sheep they continue to make money. Why cant people sell off site, a lot of people can use drop box from good computers and phones that are not on an apple, thats the whole point of dropbox! so why should drop box have to pay apple extra for their services when they are not providing one.
Possibly this is just Apple and Dropbox's dating before they get hitched. Dropbox would make an awesome inclusion to Apple's iCloud service which currently has no iDisk like function that MobileMe had. iDisk ends pretty soon so a deal could be struck quickly for the benefit of both Apple and Dropbox. One would hope that if such a deal came off they'd not drop the Android, Windows and Unix versions though.
I used to have a better sig than this, but I got tired of it