Sleepy-Head

The iPhone App Store converted Apple from being a hardware partner to being a platform vendor. Apple doesn’t hook up with software developers to create software that works on the iPhone; it maintains room and board for developers to sell themselves to its clients, whose entire experience is controlled by Apple. Apple’s not the hardware side of a marriage; it’s now a pimp (ahem, “madam”) for software workers who are free to leave but not to break the rules.

/via Why the Mac App Store is such a priority for Apple — RoughlyDrafted Magazine.

It’s clear to me that the only reason Android has enjoyed so much success is that Google has given the carriers pretty much everything they could ask for, and the carriers have responded with the ton of marketing dollars and subsidies that Google needed in order for Android to have any shot to compete with the iPhone. While I can criticize Google for compromising Android in an effort to please the carriers, I have to admit that if they hadn’t done this, Android would very likely be irrelevant today.

/via Joe Hewitt. Clarification of Hewitt’s views on Android. The quote above in particular is surprisingly clear though. Android isn’t competing on quality, it’s competing by giving carriers things they want so they market more for them. I’d prefer iOS to that.

Reading Gruber’s post about iPhone app quality over quantity. His argument is that the iPhone has so many apps because of its quality.

The danger I see is in conflating cause and effect. Is the App Store popular because the iPhone is great? Or is the iPhone great because the App Store is popular? There’s a big difference between those two arguments. The latter is the argument Microsoft has long made regarding the advantage of Windows: Windows is great because Windows has the most software and most developers.

It’s not one or the other, they are two different aspects of a computing platform. Looking at it like mac versus windows is helpful. The mac has super high quality apps for things people do a lot. Transmit is the best ftp app, Textmate is the best text editor (in my opinion of course!), Tweetie is the best twitter client. These are quality apps. The mac is great because it has the best software. Windows on the other hand has more apps. But this is a honest feature separate and apart from quality. If you want to use a gui text editor you would be better off with TextMate on a mac, than Notepad++. If you want to karyotype some metaphases though you can either get Cytovision for Windows, or just not do it on a mac. There are a lot of niche apps that simply don’t exist on macs. Windows is great because it has the most software. If you’re using niche apps, you get stuck on whatever platform has the most software frequently. Sure, I’d love to use a well designed app for karyotyping, or for pathology informatics on a mac, but they don’t exist. Right now the iPhone is great because it has the best software and the most software, but it’s not an either or situation.

The sad thing is, I don’t think he is trying to sabotage Apple. I think he actually thinks this is a good idea, and that winmo, symbian, etc have a chance. Android certainly has a chance, and iphone. The rest will play catch-up until they are completely obsolete. They had their chance, and instead of innovation, they stagnated assuming no one would come up with anything better.

iPhone 2.0 will automatically geotag images you tage with your phone. Awesome. I hope it doesn’t automatically downscale images you email in the future though, or that flickr makes an app that can upload the real image.

I like John Gruber’s writing a lot and respect him, but really the background app thing is starting to sound very apologist. Make uninstalling foolproof.

If you truly demand the right to be able to shoot yourself in the foot with the software you install on your phone — which is a perfectly reasonable desire, and is how things work on the Mac — then the non-jailbroken iPhone isn’t for you.

Being able to “shoot yourself in the foot” is how things work on all platforms. It’s not how things work on, say, a toaster, or a tivo. If iPhone wants to be a platform, then people have to be able to “shoot themselves in the foot”, by which I mean install something that you decide later you don’t want, and have to uninstall it, a feat my parents could do no problem. This is all a non-starter anyway, as the app store should have ratings and user comments anyway, so people aren’t going to download these theoretical resource hog apps anyway. The bullshit that users can’t have an IM client, or a third party email client, or a feed reader, or a location updater, or a network aware calendar, etc. to save some theoretical morons the trouble of having to uninstall some apps before they run out of storage space is ridiculous. People understand that more apps slow things down, people understand what uninstalling means. Don’t limit what people can do to protect a group of people that probably don’t even exist, have some faith in your customers, Apple. iPhone background apps are required. This is a mobile networked platform. If an app can’t check something and inform the user of a change there is no point. This isn’t minor. There is not one single cool app that can be made with this restriction, it would only be games. I am optimistic though, that Apple will fix this before the sdk launch. There are options too, even an iPhone service that other apps register with that does the checking for them if they are really paranoid. If they can’t figure something out though I can only hope Android picks up some steam.