
Michael Tsai: Welcome to iPhone: Your Crappy Mac of Tomorrow, Today - toffer
http://mjtsai.com/blog/2008/08/03/welcome-to-iphone/
======
tdoggette
He's not wrong. Apple's garden-walling was become extensive enough that it's
gone beyond ensuring a good experience for their users, and has started to
damage the platform. This should have been obvious to them since jailbreaking
became so common, but I guess it hasn't quite sunk in yet. Apple needs to
allow people to use their platform, or it won't become as good as it deserves
to be.

~~~
charlesju
I respectfully disagree. I think it is important to wall off the platform and
sandbox the environment. This prevents things like stack attacks with walled
off memory and background processes doing things it should not.

With so much personal information on the mobile phone, it'll be a complete
nightmare if one of the applications is really a virus that spreads as a
background process. Since it can contact your ENTIRE contact list, such a
viral infection can crippling. In fact, in the Jailbroken iPhone community
there have already been a couple of viruses.

But on the other hand, they should open up a couple more APIs, the camera,
specifically.

~~~
tptacek
None of the limitations being discussed with the iPhone have anything to do
with whether programs are vulnerable to "stack attacks". The iPhone doesn't
even have background processes. And "virus" is just a scary-sounding word for
"program that deletes important files on your behalf". Don't run those.

I respect the "walled garden" as a business decision; it's Apple's platform,
and maximizing its revenue is their prerogative. As a technical safeguard,
there's no evidence that it works.

~~~
tomsucks
Here's my top: <http://pastie.org/246884>

MobileSafari, MobileMail, MobilePhone, all running in the background.
fairplayd is the fairplay daemon, commcenter manages communications (all of
them), springboard is the desktop, lockdownd is the little thing that checks
to make sure the phone is activated (and locks it down if not)

only the top three apps (bash, top, sshd) aren't there on a vanilla iPhone.
Apple's apps will run in the background, but other (app store) apps exit
completely when you return to the home screen.

~~~
tptacek
Sorry, you're right. Apple can do whatever it wants on their phone, as you've
pointed out. Evil third party developers can't.

~~~
tomsucks
Technically, good nda-abiding sdk-using $99-paying developers can't, evil ones
that write their apps for jailbroken phones can ;)

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fauigerzigerk
So we seem to have these facts: The iPhone platform is a commercial success
for Apple. The iPhone platform is a commercial success for 3rd party devs. The
iPhone platform is tightly controlled by a vendor whose actions range from
understandable lies to misleading behaviour and outright bullying.

So, is there anything to be criticised or is commercial success a
justification for everything that is lawful?

I think being the uber cool bully who lends his followers success for a while
but may turn against them at any moment is a dangerous long term strategy.

It basically means that Apple's growth rates must keep up with the
inconvenience caused by their behaviour. And I don't mean just intellectual
inconvenience that affects only a small number of people (closed vs open
platforms, etc). I mean getting harassed by a vendor has a cost and that cost
needs to be covered by growth. It's as simple as that.

~~~
Tichy
I think it is too early to judge the iPhone as platform for 3rd party devs.
OK, some people got rich already, but they might have profited from the early
hype, in other words, the seeds for their earnings have been sown long before
the iPhone platform launched. It remains to be seen if the platform is still
viable once the dust has settled down.

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jonmc12
So far this year, I have:

1) rented a video from iTunes which I could not play on my iPod, because it
was 2 years old and no longer supported.

2) Not been able to utilize my eclipse plugins that run on Java 1.6 due to
Apple not supporting 64-bit carbon (required for eclipse on osx). This is
after they took an extra 12 months just to support java 1.6 at all.

Apple made both of these decisions consciously. They make good products to
create a good customer experience, then base support purely on ROI with no
concern for customer experience.

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toffer
What I thought was most interesting about the linked article was the charge
that Apple has been misleading it's developers, not whether Apple's iPhone
strategy is right or wrong from a business or technical perspective. At what
point does putting the best possible spin on things cross over into outright
lying?

Is it fair to characterize Apple's guidance to developers as misleading?

If so, will Apple's behavior eventually drive away developers, or can they
always count on developers sticking around, so long as they continue to
produce hot products like the iPhone?

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charlesju
I completely agree with you. I think that there are very smart reasons for why
Steve Jobs did what he did.

When the iPhone version 1.0 was released AT&T probably was still in the "I'm a
big carrier, hear me roar" kind of mentality. But as the iPhone blew up, AT&T
released that it needed to adjust quick, so perhaps that's how Apple was able
to push through their SDK.

I think in general Apple just has to be more open with it's fan cult.

~~~
tptacek
... or not. The iPhone has been embraced _enthusiastically_ by the Mac
developer market, and has attracted still more developers from outside it.
Despite the fact that those same devs clearly are getting smacked around by
Apple. 'Twas ever thus; find a longtime Mac developer without a story about
how bad a dev partner Apple is.

The fact is, 99.999% of the addressable market for iPhones does not concern
itself with these "limitations". It might be irrational for Apple to open up
more now.

~~~
pchristensen
Most people will happily accept any restriction that makes their phone less of
a PITA than their computer. Has anyone looked at normal cell phones lately?
They don't do much, they have a million hard-to-use menus, and _they don't
crash or reboot_. The goal of the iPhone is to improve on #1 and #2 and hold
religiously to #3. And they will make a lot of money for doing that.

~~~
stcredzero
Ever since the 2.0 update, my iPhone crashes and reboots.

~~~
pchristensen
If the iPhone does become as unreliable as a computer, AppleT&T is in for some
trouble. Let's hope the 2.1 update fixes this.

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tomsucks
There's a reason that [FUCKING NDA](<http://fuckingnda.com/>) exists.

