waffle

Let me tell you how it’s going to happen.

Within a week, the first application to enable iPhone 3G and iPhone OS 2.0 jailbreaks will appear. Soon after this, certainly before August is over, AppTapp Installer will have been ported. Before Apple will have the chance to announce new iPods this holiday season, we’ll be able to use the iPhone SDK, including Xcode and its newly sprung iPhone knowledge and Interface Builder’s new smarts, to develop iPhone software without having to work under these conditions.

You know I actually joined the iPhone Developer Program? I thought all those thoughts, wrote all those words and then played devil’s advocate, telling myself “what if it’s not that bad?” So I paid the $99 equivalent (plus sales taxes), I waited for the magical email and I logged into the Program Portal, and all I could see was a wall of Process, Process, Process. Dozens of PDF pages to read to obfuscate the simple process of compiling an application and having it run, in order to keep our devices safe from… what, precisely? Ad Hoc wasn’t a liberation; it was just a way of exposing part of the Enterprise Program functionality to those who weren’t 500+ employee corporations intent on paying $299 to put applications on — I’m sorry, deploy to — devices they already own.

I own an iPhone 3G, bought in Sweden, with the requisite Telia plan (despite the 18 month contract, it’s not actually that bad; and no, it’s not one of the devilish iPhone-specific plans). I am enrolled as an iPhone developer in the for-pay program. I am at liberty to generate a bunch of code signing, identity and DRM memorabilia that will enable me to connect my iPhone and write apps that run on it, as well as upload them to the App Store.

I’m just not going to do it. Any iPhone apps I potentially release will be released outside of the App Store until such time that Apple gets their fucking business deal and their respect towards the customer right; where DRM and code signing are not used as security theater allowing them to act as a doorman with a right to revoke anything you dare stuff onto your own device. It makes me sick, and I won’t have any part in it. Apple can keep what I paid them; perhaps it was worth the fee to confirm my suspicions that Ad Hoc was just a feel-good measure and that underneath the veil, things weren’t really better.

The big issue isn’t that the DRM on the iPhone is keeping me from paying once to Super Monkey Ball and then sending it to all of my friends, it’s that it keeps me from even running anything on the device without putting Apple in the encryption trust chain somewhere no matter what I do, which gives them the power to charge me for wanting to write anything and the power to theoretically revoke my access at any time, in a scenario that’s more tangible and realistic than the TPM scare two years back.

I know what you’re thinking: if he’s doing this, and he’s hoping to have people download his apps, does he really think about those users? If this is the price for “reaching every iPhone user”, I’d rather not; just like switching to Cuba’s way of government to get that extra tenth of a percentage unit in literacy isn’t generally considered “worth it”. Maybe every once in a while, Apple will try to plug these holes, and they’ll stay plugged for a week, and then they’ll be opened again. This is how a disgruntled user base in combination with any DRM system in existence works, and it may suck for people during that week if they want to upgrade, but it’s a simple way of civil disobedience.

It’s a matter of integrity, it’s a matter of how credible I can be hating a system that I’d be making money using, especially a system that I hate more the more I know about it. It’s a matter of making a statement without switching to some supposedly better phone that’s open source and totally great and not even here yet. It’s still my hope that Apple will eventually turn around on this, but I’m not exactly holding my breath. In the meantime, I will be using their development tools to develop software for my specimen of their phone; I’ll just be running it there under my premises instead of theirs. I look forward to the day where this is the default instead of the shocking alternative concept it is today.