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Apple Blocks Google From Running Its Internal iOS Apps (theverge.com)
Apple has now shut down Google's ability to distribute its internal iOS apps, following a similar shutdown that was issued to Facebook earlier this week. From a report: A person familiar with the situation tells The Verge that early versions of Google Maps, Hangouts, Gmail, and other pre-release beta apps have stopped working today, alongside employee-only apps like a Gbus app for transportation and Google's internal cafe app. UPDATE: Apple has restored Google's Enterprise Certificate so its internal apps will now function.
Google has been fucking with Apple for years, started with Maps, extended into browser space. Using Safari I can't get Google sites to render properly. On the other hand, Apple should have not messed with the web and introduced the new mobile web, which sucks balls, and sites detect your browser, and won't give you the content you want. But on the other hand, Google is far more meddling than Apple has been to the web at large. This idea of manipulating Internet users with new web standards is bullshit, and both Apple and Google are culpable. Any browser, even those from 1994, should work forever! Updating the web the way they have been only serves the big corps. This is shit Adobe pulled to force updates, which Apple has done for some time, to force hardware upgrades: "sorry, we broke the web, your 3yo browser won't render properly anymore! Buy a new computer!" Fuckers.
It's not like anything else privacy related happened recently at Apple that they might be compensating for...
Check your premises.
I know this little spate probably won't help tear them apart, but this sort of thing totally activates my inner desire to see all of these stupid walled gardens torn down. We used to have general-purpose computing where if you owned a piece of hardware, you could put any software you wanted to on it and no one else could stop you. Now we see Apple's iOS walled garden firmly entrenched and macOS tightening the screws in small increments with each OS update to move in that direction, plus Microsoft trying to coerce people into walled gardens with Windows 10 S Mode and even with some of the SmartScreen options. Android and Linux are the only places that are generally free from the dangers of these walled gardens that lock users out of using their own hardware as they see fit. Wouldn't it be great if these big corporations got in a childish feud that resulted in tearing down the walls of their walled gardens?
Isn't it a message to every enterprise everywhere that Apple are in total control of your platform and can disable your work without notice or warning, rendering any investment you made worthless?
If I were a corporation looking to deploy an internal app, I'd be looking at non-apple options. Having your internal platform disabled could cripple smaller business to the point of threatening their viability.
And if I were Google, I'd be relaxed to see Apple making that point so effectively.
Oh, you mean instead of following the letter of the contract you signed, you do something that violates that contract, and when you are caught, and the other party terminates their part of the contract, it is their fault?
You are a special kind of stupid, aren't you?
How was Apple supposed to know? The whole point of enterprise apps is that enterprises can run anything they want on any of their devices without going through Apple. The users who were involved in this stuff were installing provisioning profiles that identified their devices as belonging to Facebook and Google. Given that Apple isn't privy to employee records at Facebook and Google, they have no way of telling whether provisioning profiles are being abused, so again I ask: how was Apple supposed to know?
Isn't it a message to every enterprise everywhere that Apple are in total control of your platform and can disable your work without notice or warning, rendering any investment you made worthless?
"Without notice or warning"? They flagrantly disregarded the cardinal rule of the license they agreed to, which is spelled out in plain language in the subtitle, first paragraph, second paragraph, definitions, appropriate use section, etc. of the license. The license is even subtitled "for in-house, internal use applications". It really couldn't be any clearer. You can make pretty much anything you want for internal use, so long as it remains internal.
If I were a corporation looking to deploy an internal app, I'd be looking at non-apple options. Having your internal platform disabled could cripple smaller business to the point of threatening their viability.
Why? Is your hypothetical corporation breaking the cardinal rule too? The only people who need to be worried are those who haven't been using the license in good faith. So long as you're using the license as it was plainly intended to be used—to develop and use apps internally—you have nothing to fear, despite suggestions to the contrary.
By all indications, Facebook and Google agreed to the same license as everyone else, and the license is anything BUT ambiguous, given that it's subtitled "for in-house, internal use applications" and then only gets more explicit about how it's intended to be used from there. I ran through a lot of the details about the license in a comment yesterday.
They didn't just revoke they keys for those apps though, they revoked the whole certificate on which all app distribution profiles were built - affecting possibly hundreds of valid internal apps as well.
Correct. Apple once again proves they are enterprise-hostile motherfuckers.
All other businesses considering Apple should take note.
This should demonstrate to enterprise level purchasers the peril in becoming involved with Apple, who are historically an enterprise-hostile vendor.
Or perhaps it will demonstrate that Apple won't let them get away with abusing their internal use certificates that allow less restricted use of device resources in order for those licensees to take further advantage of public end users and violate Apple's software license agreements.
Yes, we'll all take note - that Apple considers the privacy of their users to be of paramount importance. So important, in fact, that Apple will drop even facebook and google from their platform if that's what it takes.
Blatant violation requires extreme response. This was a message to Google and Facebook to stop being total dicks