Tom Insam

Links on iPhone and Android

Pages that have caused some sort of emotional response in me. There's a bias here towards things complaining about App Store policies, because they annoy me, but there's the odd pro-Apple piece in there as well; they might count as balance.

They're listed in the order I came across them. I may add to the list later - I'll probably add things to it as I find them.

Ben Ward's Scattered Mind

So, the original, 3 years old EDGE iPhone, which has not been on sale since the iPhone 3G was launched in 2008, and which has been supported with every iPhone OS update so far, is a comparable ‘legacy’ situation to the fact I can go to Verizon right now and purchase a ‘Motorola Devour’ that only runs Android 1.6?

-- Ben Ward

Sayonara, iPhone: Why I'm Switching to Android

What makes this even more insulting is that Jobs tries to dress up his selfishness as a kind of altruism. He says it's all about creating a beautiful experience, that while he may be selling you an intentionally crippled device, he's doing it for your own good.

-- Dan Lyons

Android vs. iPhone Notes - Steven Frank

A long list of pros/cons that I can't reasonably excerpt here.

I’m Abandoning iPhone Development

Ask permission environments crush creativity and innovation. In healthy environments, when would-be innovators/creators identify opportunities the only thing that stands between the idea and its realization is work. In the iPhone OS environment when you see an opportunity, you put in work first, ask Apple’s permission and then, only after gaining their approval, your idea can be realized.

-- Dan Grigsby

*cough* bullshit *cough*

Apple is a company that produces amazing, human-usable products. I love them for the same reason I love any such company, and I forgive them their eccentricities because their products are so amazing. They make decisions that I’m told are bad for me, yet I don’t see that reflected in their products as I use them.

-- Mike Lee

revMobile and Apple's new iPhone SDK Agreement

In response to a question in a recent Apple shareholder’s meeting, Jobs said that a HyperCard-like product for the iPad would be a good idea “though someone would have to build it”.

...

Steve Jobs has now rejected our proposal and made it clear that he has no interest in having revMobile available on the iPhone or iPad in any form

-- Kevin Miller

[C4 release];

Apple is crazy-innovative in terms of hardware and software design, but I can count the total number of software engineering advances they’ve made on one hand.

Section 3.3.1 makes developers wholly reliant on Apple for software engineering innovation.

-- Jonathan 'Wolf' Rentzsch

iPad definitely a threat to Windows

I love my ThinkPad T400. But when I go to it, I have to pray whether it’ll come out of sleep. If it does come out of sleep, it’ll be slow. Maybe it will be out of batteries. Who knows.

-- frogboy

Open is for losers

When Costolo asked whether he would invest in a company building for the iPhone versus Google’s Android platform, [Paul] Graham answered, “Of course, iPhone. I’m talking about what I hope will set us free, not what will generate opportunities.

-- Anthony Ha

Regarding John Nack on Apple’s Control Over Native iPhone OS Software

Apple is testing whether a tightly controlled and managed app console platform will succeed or fail based on its own merits, as determined by customers.

-- John Gruber

Cocoa, Flash, and Safari

HTML5 is an open standard. Yes, the W3C process can be frustrating. But Apple is a W3C member, and more importantly, it has a product in Safari / WebKit that not only tracks the standard, but drives it. WebKit has been a leader in modern web technology adoption for years. Apple happily gives its improvements back to the public WebKit branch, because leading is the next best thing after owning.

-- Matt Drance

Is Android Evil?

Is Android evil? No, it isn’t. It has done no harm – quite the contrary, Android has boosted the level of innovation on mobile software. The point of the article is not to vilify Google or concoct visions of Darth Vader; but to balance the level of openness hysteria with a reality check on the commercial dynamics of mobile open source.

-- Andreas Constantinou

Five rational arguments against Apple's 3.3.1 policy

It’s hard to build a business on a platform where you feel like you cannot trust the men in power. If they can take down Adobe a few days before the launch of their flagship product, what hope do smaller players hold?

...

[..] This is especially true when Tier A developers like EA gets away with things that Tier C developers in their basement don’t. It breeds an air of aristocracy where the lords can roam as they please but the peasants are kept on a tight leash.

-- David Heinemeier Hansson

Apple's wager

Cumulatively, these actions represent a huge bet placed by Apple. The proposition is this: Apple is betting it can grow its platform fast enough, using any means necessary, that developers will stick around despite all the hardships and shoddy treatment. Each time it chooses to do what it thinks is best for the future of the iPhone OS platform instead of what will please developers, Apple is pushing more chips into the pot.

-- John Siracusa

Why Apple Changed Section 3.3.1

If you’re a developer and you’ve been following Apple’s advice, you will never even notice this rule. You’re already using Xcode, Objective-C, and WebKit. If you’re an iPhone developer and you are not following Apple’s advice, you’re going to get screwed eventually. If you are constitutionally opposed to developing for a platform where you’re expected to follow the advice of the platform vendor, the iPhone OS is not the platform for you. It never was. It never will be.

-- John Gruber

Pain Is A Gift

Pain is a gift: the signal that prevents a burned finger tip from becoming a body engulfed in flames. Apple is numb from success, and I hope the emerging competition from Google and others will re-sensitize them to the threat of failure.

-- Daniel Jalkut

Android VM Performance is not a Factor

Fifteen years ago, all we thought that Java needed to rule the known universe was a faster VM. If we just had that, Windows and all native UI applications were toast. After lots of hard work by wicked smart people, and more than a few years, Java VM performance was increased to the point where it wasn’t a problem any more. But that didn’t change the equation of where Java did or didn’t succeed. Most notably, the Java GUI applications didn’t suddenly kick native Windows or MacOS applications to the curb.

-- James Duncan Davidson

From iPhone to Android

Where Android shines in some areas, it really falls apart in others. Things that are ridiculously simple on the iPhone such as taking a screenshot involves installing an SDK and going through a 15 step tutorial to do on Android.

-- Justin Williams

Gameloft Keeps Getting it Wrong

According to our refund policy, once the game is successfully installed, we cannot resend it for any reason, unless you buy it again. One purchase entitles you to one download of the game to one phone number and on one phone model only. If you delete or otherwise remove the game from your phone, or change your handset, you will have to buy it again.

-- Scott Webster

(Turns out, a single app store does stop people pulling really nasty moves)

Sentence first — verdict afterwards

Our application is being removed for a very murky reason, one which is nowhere to be found in any documentation that Apple give us developers, even worse one which Apple themselves refuse to explain, or put in writing.

-- ShiftyJelly blog

Steve Jobs Live at D8

“We’re just trying to make great products,” says Jobs again. “We don’t think Flash makes a great product, so we’re leaving it out. Instead, we’re going to focus on technologies that are in ascendancy. If we succeed, people will buy them and if we don’t they won’t….And, so far, I have to say, people seem to be liking the iPad. We are selling an iPad every 3 seconds.”

Stance

I don’t think Steve Jobs or Apple is evil, but I do think that the App Store is an idea that’s been executed in a way that deeply offends everyone involved that isn’t Apple.

-- waffle

Pulse iPad App Gets Steve Jobs’s Praise in Morning…Then Booted From App Store Hours Later After NYT Complains

[..] by the afternoon, that flush of entrepreneurial success had turned sour, after Apple informed the two that Pulse was being pulled from the App Store after it received a written notice from the New York Times Company declaring that “The New York Times Company believes your application named ‘Pulse News Reader’ infringes The New York Times Company’s rights.”

-- Kara Swisher

Google protests Apple's iPhone developers agreement

The updated language -- which was first noted by the MediaMemo blog -- appeared to
put in place significant new restrictions, particularly when it comes to Google.

Hello Lua

While explicit approval from Apple is still required, these new terms seem to acknowledge that there’s a difference between an app that happens to have non-compiled code, and a meta-platform. It’s a step that should allow for many new possibilities.

-- Matt Drance

Joyce’s Ulysses Banned Again—by Apple

Again, Apple can censor what it wants, and the rest of us can like it or not. But Apple is making a mockery of its own anti-porn stance in this instance. There is no clear reason why it should define obscenity more narrowly than the U.S. courts do. And even if there were, broadening the definition of porn to frivolous extremes turns the App Store into a joke at a moment when viable alternatives are emerging.

-- Kevin Kelleher

Almost on the App Store

When the Apple reviewers saw bs chunks of code littered throughout the documentation, it’s not hard to see how they thought I was running a custom script interpreter on the phone.

-- Rob Rhyne

Hard to judge this one. In certain lights, it is interpreting code. From another angle, it's just loading a document. Is there really a distinction anyway?

On needing approval for what we create, and losing control over how it’s distributed

The problem is that fundamentally, it's just never going to be possible to prevent the garbage. If you want to have a boutique, like the Apple retail stores, where you can buy a specially selected subset of merchandise from third parties, then great. But instead, we've conflated wanting to have that kind of retail control (a smart idea) with the only conduit by which software can be sold for the platform (an already flawed idea).

-- Ben Fry

Complexity

[..] the iPad attempts to simplify computing not by some stroke of magic, but by doing less. You can’t have full multitasking and multiple apps oncscreen at the same time and apps installable from everywhere and compatibility with Mac OS X and a physical keyboard AND simplicity.

-- Neven Mrgan

Briefs.app

Three fucking months Briefs.app has sat in the review queue, and in that time, the app review team has allowed other prototyping applications onto the app store: applications that do the same basic tasks that Briefs.app was created to do.

-- Jeff LaMarche