They treat iPhone apps the way they treat the music they sell through iTunes. Apple is the channel; they own the user; if you want to reach users, you do it on their terms. The record labels agreed, reluctantly. But this model doesn’t work for software. It doesn’t work for an intermediary to own the user. The software business learned that in the early 1980s, when companies like VisiCorp showed that although the words “software” and “publisher” fit together, the underlying concepts don’t. Software isn’t like music or books. It’s too complicated for a third party to act as an intermediary between developer and user. And yet that’s what Apple is trying to be with the App Store: a software publisher. And a particularly overreaching one at that, with fussy tastes and a rigidly enforced house style.
Category: Apple
Camino Hits 2.0
Camino is a weird, wonderful application. It’s a full-blown Cocoa browser powered by Gecko — which is the rendering engine behind Firefox. In almost every way, it is what Firefox for the Mac should be — fast, nimble and very Mac-like. And today, it’s reached the infamous 2.0 status:
After over a year of hard work by devoted volunteers, the Camino Project is proud to give you Camino 2. This latest version includes many bug fixes and new features, providing all users with an improved browsing experience.
Jailbreaking: Don’t Skirt the Issue
A couple of weeks ago, I had decided that it was time to make Google Voice a more central part of my communication workflow. Having not launched GV Mobile in a while, I fired it up to reacquaint myself with the interface, capabilities, etc. Trouble is, I couldn’t authenticate with Google. I triple-checked my credentials but the app would just throw an error on launch and that was that. A couple of people on Twitter had mentioned having the same issue and a quick Google search informed me that, sure enough, the app no longer worked. Apparently, Google had modified the Voice API such that authentication now worked differently than it did when GV Mobile was written. Because the app no longer had Apple’s seal of approval, I had little recourse because there obviously weren’t going to be any updates to the app anytime soon.
The Apple Store or Harvard?
At a press event today, Apple said that 10,000 people submitted applications to work at the new store on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, according to Gizmodo’s Matt Buchanan.
Of those, just over 200 got jobs, for a 2% acceptance rate.
Meanwhile, Harvard’s acceptance rate was 7% this past year, according to a March report in the Boston Globe. That’s 29,000 applications for about 2,000 admissions.
Sad.
Bill Gates, on Steve Jobs
“Well, he’s done a fantastic job,” Gates said. “Apple is in a bit of a different business where they make hardware and software together. But when Steve was coming back to Apple, which was actually through an acquisition of NeXT that he ran, Apple was in very tough shape. In fact, most likely it wasn’t going to survive.”
He continued: “And he brought in a team, he brought in inspiration about great products and design that’s made Apple back into being an incredible force in doing good things. And it’s great to have competitors like that. We write software for Apple, Microsoft does. They compete with Apple. But he, of all the leaders in the industry that I’ve worked with, he showed more inspiration and he saved the company.”
The Risks of an Open App Store
The AppStore would turn into a market where a few big developers gain the trust of iPhone users, and users will be reluctant to try anything new because it could completely annihilate their phone. That’s not the world I want to live in as a consumer. I want to be able to install an application with some degree of faith that the absolute junk was already weeded out.
On Rogue Amoeba’s App Store Debacle
First some background from the software developer Rogue Amoeba:
Our problems began back in July, when we first submitted this bug fix for Airfoil Speakers Touch to the App Store. While we generally disliked the restrictiveness of the review process, we’d never had any direct problems with it. Further, this was a mere bug fix – it just improved the way audio was received. It was functionally identical to the already-approved version 1.0.0. As such, we expected to have this update available by the end of July or early August.
XKCD Nails the iPhone/Droid Debate
‘Great Overall Package’
Prince McLean at AppleInsider:
The latest iMacs deliver a significant performance boost, better specs overall and much greater RAM expansion. Along with its capability to act as a DisplayPort monitor, the new model and its incredible widescreen display delivers a great overall package at a new lower price. It’s also great to see Apple offering RAM upgrades at prices that aren’t simply absurdly unreasonable.
The iMac’s glossy screen will not appeal to some users, but the display looks amazing, and is a significant jump up in quality compared to last year’s iMacs. If you’re in the market for a new iMac, the new model makes a great, well rounded upgrade. If you’re considering a new large display, you might even be tempted to get the iMac just for that, and leave it running in the background as a server or distributed processing node. The only possible downside might be if the noises we heard are typical and not something that can be addressed by AppleCare or a software update.
Prominent iPhone Developer Leaves the Platform
Joe Hewitt — one of the lead guys on Facebook’s iPhone app — in a letter to Tech Crunch:
My decision to stop iPhone development has had everything to do with Apple’s policies. I respect their right to manage their platform however they want, however I am philosophically opposed to the existence of their review process. I am very concerned that they are setting a horrible precedent for other software platforms, and soon gatekeepers will start infesting the lives of every software developer.
On the Bottom Line
While the press and rivals obsess over market share, Apple quietly comes in and makes an insane amount of money. It’s the same in the computer industry. Small market share, huge amount of money. The most important thing for all of these are companies is the bottom line. Apple wins that battle.
According to the report, Apple made $1.6 billion in operating profit off of the iPhone in Q3. Nokia, meanwhile, made $1.1 billion. Let’s put this in perspective. Recent numbers suggest Nokia controls roughly 35% of the worldwide handset market. Apple? About 2.5%.
Snow Leopard Update Kills Atom Support
It shouldn’t be long before some clever hacker figures out a workaround and releases a patched kernel to the world, re-enabling the OS on Atom based computers. But that’s not the story. The bigger message is that Apple has finally stopped ignoring the incessant buzz of the hobby-hacking, Mac netbook scene and instead pulled out a fly-swat and dealt it a whack. The war is officially on.
And ironically, this will only hit the hobbyists and tinkerers. Psystar, that other flea in Apple’s ear, is unaffected, as the fake Macs it sells do not use the Atom chip.