Played for a Fool
2012.05.25 17:29
It doesn’t take very many words to stand up for Apple for removing Airfoil Speakers Touch from the App Store for “surreptitiously” implementing AirPlay receiving. Maybe your arguments boil down to: it’s their store and they actually followed their own rules.
What is sad is that that’s not the major issue. If it were only down to “should Apple be allowed to figure out what they want to sell on their own store”, I’m not sure that there’d be much argument from anyone. That they’ve been inconsistent with the rules before matters, but it’s only part of the argument.
The meta-issue, the big issue, is that it’s down to Apple saying “since we don’t like it, you can’t have it and no one else can have it either (and if you circumvent us, which you aren’t supposed to be able to do, you are probably the scum of the earth)”.
Apple is acting like an asshole and a bully, and defending them by defending the things they are doing that are actually fine is disingenuous.
(Yes, Waffle will be coming back shortly. Consider this a first taste, but don’t think it’ll be entirely like it used to be.)
I think we have to say that Apple is more abusive towards developers and users at the moment. That is why I use Android. You can install whatever you like on it, even without rooting it. Google even endorses rooting by releasing all the Google phones prerooted, as do several other companies now.
By Steve · 2012.05.25 23:41
Some people might say “no, actually, it is entirely about them running their own store”. No, because there not being any other store or any way of running other apps without tradeoffs puts their store in another position. Should this happen on the Mac App Store, people would shrug and Rogue Amoeba would release it outside the store, maybe even on a competing app store. (Maybe with the only caveat of people being afraid of the Mac App Store being turned into something like the iOS App Store, relatively speaking. Steam is a better example, but they only deal in games.)
Some people might say “well they hacked the private key” BLAH BLAH BLAH. Apple made up their own standard. Apple doesn’t have to choose among the existing standards for everything it does and it doesn’t have to open up everything it makes up. But in my book (and also in seldom sane US law), quite a lot of things are allowed if you do them for interoperability; “breaking cryptography” is just a smoke screen. Would they have removed Microsoft Excel from the Mac App Store if it had been there and could read Numbers documents? Maybe they would, but I hope it puts it in contrast.
By Jesper · 2012.05.26 09:21