Apple Has Removed Airfoil Speakers Touch From The iOS App Store

http://rogueamoeba.com/utm/2012/05/24/apple-has-removed-airfoil-speakers-touch-from-the-ios-app-store/

by protomyth • 14 years ago

158 165 14 years ago

This is exactly what I've been talking about wrt App development on Apple. If Apple likes your product, and they steal your features for their OS or apps, they kick you out so they don't have any competition.

IMHO, it's a real douchebag business decision, and anyone with a popular unique app should always expect Apple to screw you over with no notice and have a contingency plan in the works.

raganwald2• 14 years ago

If Apple likes your product, and they steal your features for their OS or apps, they kick you out so they don't have any competition.

Yes! Sharecropping in the Orchard:

http://weblog.raganwald.com/2004/11/sharecropping-in-orchard...

earl3• 14 years ago

Your point is more than fair, but at this point, does anyone not know the deal with Apple (and Google and Microsoft for that matter?) All these companies are looking out for #1. If it becomes in their interests to screw you, look out. Apple: examples too numerous to mention. Microsoft: the whole world by delaying the internet for 6-10 years by killing off all alternate browsers then stopping any development. Everyone who purchased a computer basically ever by forcing manufacturers to always buy their OS no matter what they sold on the computer. Google: skyhook, google+, dropbox, etc.

mikeryan• 14 years ago

I'm not sure anyone cares but Arlo & Konfabulator ended up at Yahoo! and Konfab is the basis for their Connected TV App Platform

http://connectedtv.yahoo.com/

bluthru2• 14 years ago

So which is it, software patents are good and this is "stealing", or software patents are bad and this is inevitable?

ConstantineXVI3• 14 years ago

"Stealing" features is one thing, taking advantage of your control over a particular market to shut out the "competition" you "stole" said features from isn't justifiable in any way (IMHO).

koeselitz• 14 years ago

One may believe that it's unscrupulous to undercut another company and co-opt their ideas without believing that the software patent system is tenable or just. Similarly, I believe lying is generally unethical; but I certainly don't believe there should be a law against lying.

drumdance• 14 years ago

It's one thing to steal an idea. It's another thing altogether to deny access to the market.

bede• 14 years ago

I don't think anyone is complaining about the theft of the feature here. It's the fact that Apple is leveraging its power as the ecosystem owner to harm the competition.

Everyone expects Apple to call the shots on their own app store to some extent, but it becomes unacceptable when well intentioned and heavily invested developers get screwed over by Apple making anticompetitive exceptions to their own, already volatile, set of rules.

baddox• 14 years ago

It's the latter. It's unfortunate for these app developers, but it's not tough to predict when you look at Apple's history with the App Store.

mikeash7• 14 years ago

Wait, how is this related to software patents?

acdha• 14 years ago

Software patents are bad, full stop.

This, however, has nothing to do with that: it's about consumer choice: making a better product and tempting people away with it is normal and healthy but abusing a lead in one market to prevent people from being able to make a choice in another is always bad.

This is the strongest criticism of Apple's app store policies: on the Mac if you get Karelia-ed that's not pleasant but it's a business risk you assume along with the possibility of any other large company entering the market. On iOS, Apple will preemptively kill your ability to sell a product before their competitor even ships, preventing your customers from even being able to decide that they prefer the app which ships with the OS.

kalleboo3• 14 years ago

I remember a time before Jobs returned when Apple would buy the third-party apps that they put into their OS, instead of just ripping them off.

ConstantineXVI3• 14 years ago

iTunes (fka SoundJam), GarageBand[1], and Siri were all bought under Steve's watch.

[1] strictly speaking, it's the developers they bought (along with Logic)

evan_• 14 years ago

eh, you've obviously never heard the term "getting sherlocked": http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sherlocked , definition 2

edit: nevermind, I had the timeline off- this came to rise after Steve came back.

jsz0• 14 years ago

If Apple likes your product, and they steal your features for their OS

AirTunes came out in 2004 and AirFoil followed a year later as a software accessory compatible with AirTunes.

cletus• 14 years ago

What you're describing is the situation every time you develop on someone else's platform: Apple's, Microsoft's, Facebook's, everyone's.

If you're developing apps for a platform you want to be in one of two positions:

1. The app is secondary to whatever service you're providing (eg the Facebook app on iOS); or

2. You're developing games.

Everything else has to walk a fine line between failing and being successful enough that it gets absorbed into the platform.

Apple is just like everyone else in this regard. No platform owner is going to ignore something that they decide has become of critical importance to their platform. It's simply a fantasy to assume otherwise.

If you're not in one of those two categories you're basically hoping to be the lucky one who gets bought out (eg the official Twitter mobile client).

lucian19002• 14 years ago

When Windows grows a new feature, old apps providing that feature don't get shut down instantly.

zmmmmm• 14 years ago

> What you're describing is the situation every time you develop on someone else's platform: Apple's, Microsoft's, Facebook's, everyone's.

Ah, so that's why FireFox and Chrome were banned from Windows. Oh wait they weren't.

Ah, so it must be why the Amazon Appstore for Android can't be installed on Android any more. Oh wait, it can, along with dozens of other app stores.

But it does explain why the Kindle app is crippled on Android so that Google Books can take prime position. Oh wait, it's not.

You have a point, but you try to use that point to gloss over the real issue here. On other platforms your product just has to be good enough to succeed (eg: Kindle app). On Apple's platform(s) it is not about being good, in fact the better your product is the more threatened it is by Apple's anticompetitive practices.

ryannielsen• 14 years ago

You're assuming you know why the app was pulled. Was it pulled because Apple's going to introduce a competing feature in iOS 6 and doesn't want the competition? Or was it pulled because the app is using the leaked AirPlay encryption key? Or was it pulled for some other unknown reason?

We don't know.

Frankly, I doubt Apple would give a damn about competition for a feature they plan to introduce in iOS 6. They don't care about other apps that reimplement iOS features, such as music players or (now) mail clients. Why give a damn about AirFoil?

Finally, unless you own, or no one owns, the platform on which you're developing, you're always at risk for something like this happening. This is nothing new, and it's definitely not behavior that's isolated to Apple.

calinet62• 14 years ago

Trader Joe's does this too. They test your products in-store, then clone them and sell their own if they're successful.

roc• 14 years ago

Doesn't Apple have some boilerplate that specifically disallows peer-to-peer content transfer in iOS apps? Streaming-only may edge around the language, but may still run afoul of the intent.

I think it may be premature to blame this on Apple removing a competitor to make way for a first-party feature. I think their content partners are just extremely sensitive about this issue and these clauses and their enforcement are just a price Apple is currently willing to pay to keep them happy.

See also: wifi hotspot functionality and provider desire to charge for tethering.

smackfu• 14 years ago

I don't think it's in the current guidelines (it's not in the Oct 2010 one). Someone with a developer account can check.

js4all2• 14 years ago

I suspect that this app uses Apples's leaked key for airplay encryption. In that case I would understand the rejection. I can't wait for the official explanation.

cbryan• 14 years ago

This. A thousand times.

calinet62• 14 years ago

Yep. It's a reverse-engineered protocol using a leaked encryption key. The developers had to know this wouldn't last forever.

cooldeal3• 14 years ago

The fact that there is no reason given to the app developer for the rejection is a separate and bigger(IMO) problem here.

>I can't wait for the official explanation

Is there a guarantee of one? If the issue becomes a PR nightmare, maybe. Gruber would call this "Measure twice, cut once" and a good move by Apple.

mikeash7• 14 years ago

What Gruber actually said about this is, "I can’t imagine what Apple would object to with this app, or why they wouldn’t provide Rogue Amoeba with a precise explanation before removing the app."

Although I imagine if it was some company he didn't see favorably, he would probably go for your explanation rather than the one he actually posted for this.

tobiasbischoff3• 14 years ago

exact. anything that uses the key that james laird extracted from the dumped Airport Express ROM will never stay long in the store.

lucian19002• 14 years ago

Even if that is the case, I'd say needing a central key for AirPlay is unethical in the first place since it unnecessarily locks out third parties.

jacquesm• 14 years ago

Funny how nobody else seems to notice this. That key is there for a reason, and one of those reasons apparently is anti-competitive behavior.

Keys and other mechanisms like it are not usually used to increase customer service but to increase vendor lock-in and control of those users. It's all about creating a captive audience.

lukifer9• 14 years ago

This is the great irony of a free market: that it includes the creation of closed, private markets which are decidedly un-free. (Apple's the biggest jerk about it, but there are many others, such as the game console manufacturers, or Amazon's app store). And as evidenced by the App Store's enormous success, the market does not inherently select in favor of open markets versus closed ones.

Apple of the 2010s is much more deserving of DoJ investigation than 1990s Microsoft ever was. And if I had my druthers, ecosystem monopoles of this type would be blatantly illegal, and manufacturers would be obligated to include jailbreak capability in every single device. (Not holding my breath.)

junto• 14 years ago

Your comments are absolutely spot on.

Pewpewarrows• 14 years ago

People tend to conveniently forget that it's the consumers in an economy who define a monopoly. There's nothing inherently wrong with it. If a monopoly occurs because the majority of consumers are giving that product/service their money, then it must be deserving of it. If enough people are dissatisfied with the quality, they'll turn to new business, and the monopoly will cease to exist.

The market has and will continue to regulate itself without legislative interference. I see no reason for the government to get involved with Apple's private marketplace.

Edit: I'll put it this way: You don't like Apple's closed market because they can define arbitrary rules that makes it hard to compete. How is that any different than a Government defining arbitrary rules on the national marketplace?

cooldeal3• 14 years ago

> If enough people are dissatisfied with the quality, they'll turn to new business, and the monopoly will cease to exist.

Wish it were so simple, but the problem is the ecosystem. A new business will not start out with 500K apps and developers won't develop apps till a platform has a lot of users, a chicken-and-egg problem. Users don't like buying devices with only a few apps available. Looks at WebOS, it was a good platform but died.

This is not even mentioning the real costs of switching, like not having access to already purchased apps and content because they're locked down(music, movie, ebook purchases).

It was a big problem with Windows in the 90s, you had to get a Windows computer to run software needed to be compatible with others.

wslh2• 14 years ago

> People tend to conveniently forget that it's the consumers in an economy who define a monopoly. There's nothing inherently wrong with it.

Yes there are issues with monopolies. This is why new laws must be created to protect against these monopolies.

lukifer9• 14 years ago

> If a monopoly occurs because the majority of consumers are giving that product/service their money, then it must be deserving of it.

"Deserving" is subjective, and that attitude doesn't seem far from "might makes right". Beta was better than VHS (or so I hear), but the consumers went where the content was, and the better format lost.

> I see no reason for the government to get involved with Apple's private marketplace.

Except it already is involved: the government issues currency and defends copyrights and patents, all backed by (heavily abstracted) violence. In fact, remove the threat of prosecuting NDAs alone, and I guarantee that Apple as we know it would collapse within a year.

> How is that any different than a Government defining arbitrary rules on the national marketplace?

In theory, the rules are not arbitrary, but driven by democratic processes. In practice, such rules might as well be arbitrary, if not openly hostile, and I will stipulate this as unfixable (for now).

But we already have marketplace rules all over the place, whether by law or by convention: don't false advertise, don't market poison as candy, etc. I don't see why "you're not allowed to encrypt everything so you're the only game in town" can't be one of them. Moreover, I don't see a difference between a tyrannical Apple and a tyrannical government, except in details and scale, and I'm not willing to settle for either.

For the record: I am typing this on a MacBook Pro. I think curtailing Apple's monopolistic tendencies would be not only be good for users and the ecosystem, but in the long run, good for Apple itself. For instance: if users are allowed to side-load any old app, they can curate their App Store to their heart's content, including only the best of the best, and regular users would be more satisfied their experience as a result.

efsavage3• 14 years ago

You're right in that there's nothing inherently wrong with a monopoly. There's only things wrong with how you got it, and more importantly, how you use it. When you use collusion to build one (or a cartel), that's a problem. When you start using it to preclude people from turning to an alternative, that's a problem.

Right now Apple is the dominant player in the mobile phone space, but it's definitely not a monopoly, and AFAICT they aren't really doing anything that is preventing competitors from entering the market. iCloud is a step in that direction, but it's not very good right now so we'll have to wait and see. Android basically lets Apple do whatever they want, and is the credible competitor that Microsoft was lacking.

Where Apple was a monopoly was in mp3 players, and where they were abusing it was with their DRM, by also having the dominant music store, and not allowing other devices to get music from it, or to let other stores sell DRM music for the iPod. They removed it, and I don't think it had anything to do with consumers, it was simply an anti-trust target that was growing larger by the day. They were smart and fixed that.

chris_wot4• 14 years ago

I must disagree. Except in a few cases, monopolies cause problems with deincentivization of innovation, uncompetitive behaviour, poorer outcomes for consumers and often higher prices than there would be otherwise were there a competitor.

Apple are beginning to show all these signs. I would suggest that given enough instances of incidents like these that the US DOJ would be within their rights to start another anti-trust case.

no_more_death2• 14 years ago

Yes, you can choose from multiple options. Android, Meego, Boot2Gecko (soon). Windows Mobile, Blackberry, iOS, Bada, etc.

So: some people choose Apple for its advantages, and others choose Android for its advantages. As a matter of fact, openness was the whole purpose of Android, way back when the G1 was released. Android is an incredible success story for open source cooperating with commercial interests and gaining huge public mind share.

gizzlon2• 14 years ago

> If a monopoly occurs because the majority of consumers are giving that product/service their money, then it must be deserving of it.

Why exactly? The argument works if you make it circular (they deserve it because they get it), but so what?

It's not like consumers always do whats best for them, especially in the long run. Even if if the consumer did what was best for him or herself, that might not be what's best for everyone.

Honestly, I don't get where this seemingly naive faith, that everything will just take care of it self, comes from. Personally I can't see any evidence of that.

wmeredith• 14 years ago

You may want to be careful who you sick the DoJ on, the less they do in tech, the better.

Additionally, Apple is far from a monopoly. The App store is where everyone wants to be so it can seem that way, but it's not.

lukifer9• 14 years ago

In the strict legal sense, Apple is not a monopoly. However, they do have a monopoly on iOS app distribution. While they're not the only game in town for users, they are for developers (who will go where the users go).

We would all cry foul if the government shut down your business because it conflicts with interests of state. Why should we not also cry foul for a corporation to de-facto shut down your business because it violates their interests?

I'm not sure that Apple has violated any existing laws (IANAL). But even so, I think the rules need re-thinking when we talk about not just technical platforms, but their marriage to business platforms.

At the end of the day, it makes little difference to Rogue Amoeba whether they were shut down by government tyranny or by corporate whim: it matters that they were shut down at all, and we all suffer for the economic output which they (and others) are unable to create for themselves and society. It's antithetical to the very purpose of capitalism.

wslh2• 14 years ago

> Apple of the 2010s is much more deserving of DoJ investigation than 1990s Microsoft ever was.

Not only that. Google, Twitter, Facebook et al are in the same situation. I am always arguing that with Microsoft you can reverse engineer their software. No more support for DOS? you can find a way to have a working application. You can't reverse engineer the cloud.

rimantas• 14 years ago

> And if I had my druthers, ecosystem monopoles of this type > would be blatantly illegal,

Good thing you don't, because you don't know what monopoly is not to mention knowing what's legal and what's not.

lukifer9• 14 years ago

I do know what it is; I was speaking broadly, not intending the strict legal definition. And I'm aware that Apple may not be guilty of violating existing anti-trust laws. However, that doesn't mean Apple hasn't violated their spirit or intent, and if so, I believe those laws need rethinking.

shinratdr• 14 years ago

> Apple of the 2010s is much more deserving of DoJ investigation than 1990s Microsoft ever was.

Except Apple is nowhere even close to a monopoly in any of the markets it participates in. Also, if you're including console manufacturers and gaming then Apple is nowhere close to the biggest jerk. Getting a game listed in Steam, WiiWare, PSN or XBLA is more expensive and way more of a crapshoot than getting your iOS app listed in the App Store.

lukifer9• 14 years ago

In my comparison, WiiWare is guilty, and Steam is not. If WiiWare kicks me out because they think I'm a jerk, I have no recourse: their store, their console, their rules. If Steam does the same, I'm free to sell a PC game on my own website, or whatever other stores there are.

Perhaps we need a new term beside "monopoly". Obviously it's not a monopoly to consumers. Rather, they are the sole gatekeeper to thousands of businesses. The closest analogy I can see is company towns, or as many others have said, plantations.

a3d6g2f72• 14 years ago

Maybe the ecosystem just isn't big enough yet. Too much of the market is still not yet using Apple's products.

Maybe when Apple reaches Microsoft-level penetration, and of course that is their goal (Exhbit A: Apple pricing trends), you might get your druthers.

It really should not be necessary to "jailbreak" a device in the first instance. The user should be able to easily install their own choice of software on the hardware they have paid for: e.g., applications, OS, bootloader and BIOS. If you want to install Apple's software, you can. If you do not want to install their software, you can install something else. Simple.

jodrellblank6• 14 years ago

The user should be able to easily install their own choice of software on the hardware they have paid for: e.g., applications, OS, bootloader and BIOS.

Why should they? You don't get to easily put any ingredient of your choice in packaged food, or any instrument of your choice in finished songs, or any cloth of your choice in premade clothing, or any engine you like in a car.

jonhendry2• 14 years ago

"(Exhbit A: Apple pricing trends)"

Apple's prices have been pretty steady, and are frequently decried as being too high.

quotemstr• 14 years ago

Maybe Apple has a monopoly; maybe it doesn't. Regardless, what Apple is doing is _wrong_ and needs to be stopped. There are more antisocial business practices than are dreamt of in the Sherman Antitrust Act.

Steko7• 14 years ago

Those are strong words without a lot of strong arguments or facts behind them.

I'm curious what exactly is Apple accused of doing that is so much worse then what every other store in the world does?

What should Apple be stopped from doing? Making awesome devices people want? Making APIs for developers? Having standards for their store?

Do we want Apple to never remove an App after approval? Are we ok with higher fees for developers to pay for more/better app screeners and a higher bar to clear for initial approval for everyone?

lukifer9• 14 years ago

Well said. Law and policy are not holy scripture, and we should be unafraid to re-examine them from first principles, be it patent law, anti-trust, or even the Constitution itself.

chj5• 14 years ago

I'll second this. Apple's doing causes a great deal of harm to small businesses that basically only live on its platform. That is a monopoly to these small businesses. I don't see why MS is punished like hell in the 90s for bundling IE only, but apple lives comfortably now.

The only solution is iOS platform must allow third party appstore, must allow third party browsers(not wrappers). Otherwise, shit will happen again tomorrow.

no_more_death2• 14 years ago

Problem easily solved. Build your apps for Android first. You can make almost as much money on Android, and you can be secure knowing they won't pull this kind of garbage on you. Free markets are great.

astrodust3• 14 years ago

Microsoft in the 1990s controlled the only mass-market desktop operating system and there was a very real concern that they were going to take over every operating system, period, something they might've accomplished if Windows NT gained even more traction in the server space.

Apple is still a niche player. They just happen to absolutely own the most profitable end of the market and leave the majority, over 80% of it, to the rest. They're only a monopoly in a subset of the market. Nobody is going to cry because you only have one choice for an expensive product when there's hundreds of choices in the low end of the market.

idspispopd2• 14 years ago

I agree they're being dicks(even though we have famously never received a straight-story from Rogue Amoeba), but this is not anti-trust/anti-competitive or monopolistic.

To get into the hot water that Microsoft did, you need to have a monopoly on an open market, which requires that there is no reasonable choice in the market. Android proves every day that there is indeed choice - and it's actually cheaper and easier to get involved with Android. Android is 56% of the market in comparison to iOS's 23% market share. iOS is only a revenue leader, which is like saying DM Chrysler has a monopoly on rich people.

Secondly the monopolistic abuses need to influence situations that would normally be out of their control. Anyone can choose to stop selling Brand X in their own store for example, it doesn't matter how popular the store is/or how much revenue they earn.

Once those are satisfied they need to do things which leverage their position to trample competition. E.g. Microsoft deliberately changed the function of their APIs to make quicktime unstable. Microsoft deliberately fragmented Java with their own flavour to stifle Sun and the cross platform movement, Microsoft deliberately enforced a web browser on their users as a way to prevent Netscape innovating the web-app scene. Microsoft deliberately forced vendors to sell Windows-only systems by threatening them with severe price hikes if they packaged OS/2.

That is anticompetitive, and they were excellent at it. Apple always wanted a curated store and have deliberately structured their store for this reason.

lukifer9• 14 years ago

My comparison to Microsoft may be a bad analogy: while they did act anti-competitively, it's different than what Apple is doing now. As bad as Windows lock-in was, they never set themselves up as the only store in town, and they were seldom hostile to developers building a business on their platform (if anything, it was the opposite).

I know Apple doesn't hold even the majority of the market, and they won't be king forever, as the MS story demonstrates. What concerns me is that they're defining the new norm (the Windows 8 store follows heavily in their footsteps). If the next OS vendor to take the crown successfully practices the same "our way or the highway" approach, it will be bad for the marketplace, consumers, and society.

Maybe it's a self-correcting problem. But make no mistake: it is a problem.

api• 14 years ago

People get angry about this, but if they do they don't understand what iOS is.

iOS is a console platform.

Developing for iOS is a bit like developing for XBox, Nintendo, etc. It is a fundamentally different platform from Windows, Linux, and MacOS.

PythonDeveloper2• 14 years ago

Please.. help me agree with you by naming one game that was on XBOX for YEARS, which was subsequently removed from XBOX because it was too similar to an upcoming, unreleased feature?

itg• 14 years ago

The issue here is they used the encryption keys from the leaked ROM.

However, Apple should do a better job communicating that.

Steko7• 14 years ago

The fact that Apple has shitty quality control in their initial approval process so that they more often have to remove apps subsequently to approval doesn't mean that in the big picture it's at least as permissive (if not far more so) than other console development arrangements.

tikhonj• 14 years ago

That just means consoles and console makers are also horrible: it does not exonerate Apple in the least.

The main difference is that I (and most of HN) don't have to deal with consoles as developers and probably not even as users. On the other hand, I bet there are a ton of mobile developers and that almost everyone has a smart phone of some sort. So that's why there's more outrage over Apple's detrimental behavior than the console makers'.

clarky07• 14 years ago

Apple has a history of copying some apps, i.e. Instapaper etc, but they don't have a history of removing them afterwards. There could be plenty of perfectly reasonable reasons for this. I'd wait until actually finding out why before accusing them of anticompetitive behavior.

tobiasbischoff3• 14 years ago

Dude reverse-engineers Airport Express - steals secret encryption key from ROM. Other dudes use this illegal acquired key to make an app that replicates the function of the original device & submit that to the AppStore of exact that vendor of the device. Somehow it gets thru, now they yank it & anyone really wonders about it?

btrask• 14 years ago

It's not illegal. For precendent, see Lexmark International, Inc. v. Static Control Components, Inc. from 2004. Basically, the DMCA does not protect encryption designed purely for vendor lock-in. The Wikipedia has a good overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexmark_Int%27l_v._Static_Cont...

Edit: And more broadly, reverse engineering is not a crime.

tobiasbischoff3• 14 years ago

one could discuss if this encryption is for vendor lock in or for preventing someone from dumping the raw-data stream of DRM'emd material. remember the time the airport expresses and airplay for music came to market all music files in the store had fairplay DRM.

and while it might not be illegal in all countries, it's clearly against apples terms of use.

thought_alarm3• 14 years ago

Assuming that this functionality is about to become part of AirPlay, what would you have Apple do?

Do you have Apple continue to sell this app even though it's about to become a free feature of the OS? Or does Apple not implement this rather logical extension to their existing AirPlay feature simply because someone already wrote a utility to do the same?

Both those options are rather lousy for Apple's customers.

Any developer who writes a utility to implement some missing feature of the OS understands that their feature probably won't be missing forever.

MiguelHudnandez2• 14 years ago

How is allowing the app to exist a lousy experience for their customers? There is no harm in allowing competing versions of the same feature, especially if the other version was there first and people were using it.

I can see rejecting new apps that duplicate existing functionality, but proactively un-approving and pulling apps that implement a feature that might exist later?

thought_alarm3• 14 years ago

You purchase this app, then the next day Apple announces the same feature built in to the OS. You don't feel ripped off?

ChrisLTD• 14 years ago

The worst part is the lack of information from Apple. If Rogue Amoeba knew what rule their app violated they could be retooling it now. Instead they are in the dark and losing money.

DigitalSea• 14 years ago

They remove the and app and oh, what a coincidence iOS 6 has the exact same functionality baked into it. This is one of the issues with the whole closed market thing, Apple can no longer come up original phone features, so they take ideas from popular apps and bake it into their iOS, remove the app they took "inspiration" from and people clap and pat them on the back for being so innovative and introducing a revolutionary new feature.

chj5• 14 years ago

Only an APP STRIKE can stop this.

After all it is the developers that make the App Store prosperous, now they take advantage of the established platform and act like ass hole to the developers. I don't see they will change the behavior if we do nothing but complain.

fpgeek4• 14 years ago

You're absolutely right that indie developers need to do more than complain if they want Apple to take them seriously. Nevertheless, Apple has formidable tools at their disposal to fight back: ejecting ringleaders, interfering with coordinated action involving their app store (e.g. staggering suspended sales so they didn't all happen on a strike day), ranking penalties and so on.

droithomme• 14 years ago

This function will obviously be in the next release, and it's slightly harder for Apple to sell forced upgrades if there is a well designed, intuitive, independent product that maintains backwards compatibility. Therefore the rational MBA type business decision is to leverage the monopoly access to application installation that Apple maintains, and use it to destroy products that threaten even an iota of revenue, no matter what the collateral damage will be.

beedogs3• 14 years ago

Apple keeps giving me reasons to jailbreak my phone.

chj5• 14 years ago

Tons of reasons to actually switch me to android.

beedogs3• 14 years ago

I'd do that, except work bought and paid for my current phone, so I'm stuck with an iPhone for now. I've been too lame to even jailbreak it because of that.

Apple Has Removed Airfoil Speakers Touch From The iOS App Store

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