So it has come to this.
On Monday, as part of the WWDC keynote, Steve Jobs will click a button on the device in his hand, and Keynote will advance to the next slide. Pictured will be the sleek, new iPhone HD, and he will proclaim that it has a new print-quality display that’s just unbelievable, and wait until we see it, and he’ll be right.
Besides iPhone OS 4.0, it will also be powered by the App Store. None of you who read this will have failed to notice how the App Store provides some benefits for the owner of the device, nor how those benefits are supposedly guaranteed by policies and doublethink notions that are indicative of the disdain for the customer and the lack of respect for a level playing field and a fair market where grownups can make their own decisions.
I’ve been of two minds of this for a long time. I’ve been considering every Android device that’s come out so far, and it looks like the only viable competitor has spent some time coming out of the gates. (Yes, I know about Samsung Bada, MeeGo, Windows Phone 7, Blackberry and Symbian. They are the exact reason I called Android the only viable competitor.)
I will definitely buy an iPhone HD when they come out, but it might be my last iPhone. At the first sign of an Android phone that’s close enough to even the iPhone 3G S I have now, I will buy that, too, and I will use it entirely out of principle. This has been the case for some time, but I’m now even more willing to lower my standards, and the reason is that Steve Jobs has chosen to lower his.
Not his product standards, of course. No one has yet brought to market a 300+ DPI, no-funny-business mobile phone, and I have no reason to believe it will stop the tradition of running everything silky smooth. But he has thrown large chunks of whatever decency standards he once possessed to the winds.
I’m quoting:
What happens is — people lie. And then they run to the press and tell people about this oppression, and they get their fifteen minutes of fame. We don’t run to the press and say, “This guy is a son of a bitch liar!” — we don’t do that.
The most distressing App Store stories I’ve run across have been open about their entire communication with Apple. No one would blame you for pointing out fabrications in those stories, and you have chosen not to, which leads me to believe that at least some of them are true — probably all of them. I have a hard time stomaching treating your developers in this backhand, “walled garden”, “curated” way in the first place. It’s getting tough when you reject perfectly fine apps because you don’t feel like it (so much for the “customer benefit”).
I think I draw the line when you call the developers you mistreated “liars”.
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. Right now, many good ideas that come out of Apple are inexplicably intertwined with backhanded maneuvering. Maybe the App Store brings a very nice way to install, sandbox and remotely disable applications, but shouldn’t the keys be in our hand rather than yours? Maybe WebKit’s adoption of and support for HTML5 is remarkable, but shouldn’t it be touted under that name using actual HTML5 features rather than proposed additions, and allowed in any HTML5-capable browser?
Eventually, if anything is right with the universe, Apple will produce an iPhone OS version that is far less tied down than the current one, and adopt policies that are less restrictive about them being the final arbiter of decency or quality or stability or how much an application will need to do to be useful to someone. But that’s eventually.
Right now, and even more so this summer, the iPhone remains awesome. I’m not blind to awesome. But I’m not willing to unconditionally support any kind of treatment in its defense either. And it’s certainly about time I stopped wussing out of the conflict and faced it. I hope you’ll forgive me for dithering so long.
“Right now, many good ideas that come out of Apple are inexplicably intertwined with backhanded maneuvering.”
I agree with the entire spirit of this post, but the intertwining is quite explicable in my book. I don’t think the backhanded maneuvering is good for Apple’s customers or developers, but I do think it’s good for Cupertino, at least in the short-term.
“Eventually, if anything is right with the universe, Apple will produce an iPhone OS version that is far less tied down than the current one, and adopt policies that are less restrictive about them being the final arbiter of decency or quality or stability or how much an application will need to do to be useful to someone.”
That’d be awfully nice, wouldn’t it? A roadmap for where they’re going with OS X would be nice too…
By Chucky · 2010.06.05 23:38
I think it’s good for their feeling of control. I think half of the control measures they implement don’t actually even improve things for themselves; it just feels good to be a gangsta. (I think 3.3.1 might be one of few things that actually does, but only in part.)
There’s no such thing as good for them in the short term, unless you can suspend the universe in that moment and carry on business hoping nothing will ever change.
By Jesper · 2010.06.06 00:24
Maybe I should point out, since people have been sent Android phones recently, that I’ve not been close to being offered one. I doubt I’m even on the radar of these people. In the unlikely event that I am offered one, I’ll also turn it down, and disclose here that it happened.
By Jesper · 2010.06.06 00:35
“it just feels good to be a gangsta.”
Meh. I think it’s good for AAPL shareholders to kill Flash and let Apple try to build the railroad in the mobile playback sphere instead. More broadly, Apple’s apparent capriciousness around the AppStore allows them to make strategic decisions designed to maximize Cupertino’s benefit without needing to give explanations that government lawyers could later make hay with.
If you can pull off mafia-style tactics in corporate dealings, you can often reap massive rewards.
Put another way, they’re not being gangsta for fun. It’s just business.
“There’s no such thing as good for them in the short term, unless you can suspend the universe in that moment and carry on business hoping nothing will ever change.”
True, but in the long-term, we’re all dead, so the short-term has an inordinate sway over much human decision making.
Think about Facebook. Long-term, they’re destroying their brand with an oddly singular focus. But the long-term viability of their brand is not what they’re concerned about.
Institutions and governments (should) care about the long-term. Individuals just want dinner tonight. And American corporate culture is often more about the individuals running the companies than about the institutions themselves.
For all of Steve-o’s wonderfulness, he’s a bit of a threat to the institution of Apple, odd as it is to say.
By Chucky · 2010.06.06 01:35
Steve’s interesting, because he thinks “if we just have enough control, we can survive anything”. He’s convinced he’s got the long term interests at heart, especially because if it were to work, they’d be able to shield other long term interests with it. Control helps steering in the right direction, but radical coups for it never won anyone over. All you need is an alternative that’s roughly on par and that’s less controlled and you’re toast.
And yes, that kind of thinking is right now inventing vulnerabilities where they’d otherwise have precious little.
By Jesper · 2010.06.06 01:47
This is an example of a lie: “Apple Rejects Michael Wolff’s iPhone App — Because He Criticizes Steve Jobs?” It’s not like we should be repackaging each individual column as an iPhone app, so that’s why it got rejected.
However, to say “some people lie” as it was the general case, is disrespectful.
By Val · 2010.06.06 07:43
Very well said.
As for Android: I’ve had the opportunity to look at a current Android phone (HTC Legend I think) recently and while it may be a little rough in some places, I found it hard to understand why all the Mac-fanboys ridicule it. Both the hardware and the OS look perfectly usable. And when you attach it to a computer, it mounts as a drive and you can copy some files onto it for the applications on it. Just so…
By ssp · 2010.06.06 10:20
I just switched to Android. All of the points and counterpoints boil down to one single issue to me: I believe a platform where I cannot run a program without the approval of the platform vendor is fundamentally broken.
For a long I looked the other way, because the iPhone platform is, as you say, awesome. However with section 3.3.1 and the continuing heavy-handed rejections, I knew that not only was the app store arrangement fundamentally broken, but Apple wasn’t even acting in good faith in their role as platform steward.
I am very happy with my Nexus One phone. 10 minutes into using Android I knew I was using a derivative product, one that would not exist were it not for the path paved by the iPhone. However, it is still a good product and I have already benefited from the ability to run applications that Apple would not approve of, merely because they compete with Apple.
By Nick · 2010.06.07 04:43
@Nick – Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? You know you’re “using a derivative product,” but it’s close enough to good enough that you can “afford” to stand on principle. That’s the true threat to Apple — or any hegemon — right there.
I’ll buy an iPhone 4, though. I do a lot more Web development than iPhone development, and the Mac is still (albeit perhaps only temporarily) still a “non-curated” platform that does everything I have asked of it far more reliably and enjoyably than Linux (15 years experience) or that (lower-than-)lowest-common-denominator software from Redmond. I’ve long been far more concerned with open data than open source per se, and Apple are far from the most egregious offender in that regard.
I respect your decision; whatever works for you within your comfort level is what you ought to use. Also, to the degree that Android does make this a two-horse race, we are fairly likely, especially post-Steve, to see Apple adapt to customer-driven reality.
I’d love that, too… but I’m not betting next month’s mortgage money on it.
By Jeff Dickey · 2010.06.10 10:41