09.26.08
Apple Poised To Screw Up (AGAIN)
Yesterday Apple killed the end run that one scorned developer did in order to sell his application after it was not allowed in the blessediTunes App Store.
Alex Sokirynsky, creator of an application called Podcaster was shut down by Apple two weeks after his application was rejected for inclusion in the App Store because it duplicated features in the company’s owniTunes software. “Since Podcaster assists in the distribution of podcasts, it duplicates the functionality of the Podcast section of iTunes,” Apple told Sokirynsky.
Yeah, right. So what’s the big deal? The big deal is that Apple is about to royally screw themselves. Read on, dear reader, read on…
It seems that Mr. Sokirynsky did an end-run around Apple by selling and allowing people to install his software via the “Ad Hoc” mechanism that Apple created for people to beta test their software with actual users – and for enterprises that wanted to be able to distribute their apps to up to 100 internal folks.
So what Sokirynsky did was to create new “build numbers” of the application to get around the 100 person limit. He charged people $9.99 for the product and then had them send them the device’sUDID (unique device identifier) code.
The UDID is needed by the Ad Hoc program to allow the install of the software without going through iTunes and thus bypassing the App Store all together.
Pretty ingenious!
Well, Apple, being the draconian institution it is – caught on and then just yanked his account. Done.
Yeah, good move, Apple! Bravo! That’s a terrific way to motivate developers to spend time and money developing software for your platform. With the crepe paper still up at the new Android phone’s coming out party – it would seem to me that it would behoove Apple to stop this kind of heavy-handed bullshit and just do what Steve Jobs said he would do at the Spring SDK event – and that’s keep out the “bad” programs that crash, do malicious things, are just porn apps, or ones that are illegal or are bandwidth hogs.
Podcaster is none of those things.
And, I’m sure Mr. Sokirynsky is not the only developer hoping to bring cool, actually useful apps to the iPhone rather than just the 1,000 calculators and variations on to-do lists. What about things like other browsers likeFirefox or Chrome?
And as Engadget’s Ryan Block points out in his blog about this debacle – it all stems from a super restrictive SDK legal agreement:
Besides a few very specific callouts (like the no VoIP on cellular bit), all we’ve got to go by is one vague, gray, largely unspecific blanket statement: “No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s PublishedAPIs and built in interpreter(s).”
Basically, that means that you can’t build anything that you haven’t prescribed in its given tool and feature set. So if the iPhone already has something like, say, a browser (read: mobile Safari), and Google wants to port a mobile version of Chrome for the iPhone,Google’s out of luck. And Apple’s legal wiggle room is unbelievably broad. Is a Word / Excel editor a code interpreter? Is a BitTorrent client a code interpreter? Should one have to build a complete and fully functional piece of software just to find out?
Now I get the fact that Apple wants to protect the iPhone platform overall – but I agree with Ryan Block when he says:
Now, if you want to do the right thing — the thing that may ultimately keep you out of some grumpy developer’s class-action lawsuit, the thing that will take away Android’s biggest consumer appeal right now — you’ll simply stop filtering apps based on content, and only look for the kind of code Steve specifically promised to protect users against in the first place: grossly buggy and broken, malicious, or otherwise evil.
Apple, PLEASE do not mess up this perfect opportunity to dominate mobile communications the way you completely screwed yourself in the OS marketplace! Allow developers to develop cool, meaningful, useful, business applications. You’re the cool kid right now – do NOT let it go to your head – or your heart (andmarketshare) will suffer – AGAIN.
