Monday, April 26, 2010

With iPhone OS 4.0, Apple has officially turned into an evil tyranny

If Apple was a carmaker, an Apple car would look like this :
  • its wheels, windshield, wipers would only be Apple's authorized ones -- ok, for security reasons, we understand this
  • all the luggage or strollers you put in the trunk could only be Apple's approved models, sold through their shops
This is the current situation on your iPhone and iPod. Not a model of freedom!
But with iPhone OS 4.0, things are getting worse:
  • providers of wheels, wipers or strollers have to throw away their factory machines and buy Apple ones.


I love my iPhone, and I sincerely think that my MacBook is great hardware.
But freedom is more important than business or convenience.

To sum up the story of Apple's last SDK (software development kit), Apple has published new legal conditions along their iPhone OS 4.0, especially the paragraph 3.3.1, which, in plain english, has the following consequences:
  1. Apple forbids any editor to issue an intermediary tool that can be used for iPhone app development, especially the libraries that ease cross-platform development (you write your code once, it works on iPhone, Android, Blackberry, etc.)
  2. Adobe was supposed to release its Studio CS5 on April 10, that accomplishes exactly this - write once in Flash, deploy everywhere. This is undoubtedly an evil anti-competitive move from Apple.
  3. Other editors are harmed, for instance Unity Technologies that could die because of that.

Even on the worst days of Microsoft anti-competitive practices, they never went that far. They never forbid an application to run on their platform, as Apple has done with Adobe Flash or Google Voice.
Remember how angrily people were shouting at Microsoft at that time, for far less than what Apple is doing now.



I'm an iPhone fan and I often tout the merits of the device to my friends. I will not anymore. I cannot promote a dictatorship.
I am shocked, Apple went beyond any acceptable limit. This is a question of freedom. And I want a free world for my kids, not the walls Apple is building around us.

What will be next ?
People that Apple does not like will be banished? 
People that criticize Steve Jobs will be deleted from Apple's world? 
People that have not the good political views will be chased down?



With a monopoly, this would be illegal. I consider iPhones as an almost-monopoly on high-end smartphones.

Fortunately, developers are rebels in nature. They hate orders and love freedom.
Apple development environment is old-fashioned and complex - proprietary language (Objective-C), incompatible with what most developer use, and on Mac only.

I think this will turn into a fantastic opportunity for Android, since they are very developer-friendly, run in Java, on Eclipse IDE.



Apple products may be magical, they are nothing but a magical jail.
Let's break the chains.

Change your mind Apple, don't try to format ours.

2 comments:

Herve said...

"If Apple was a carmaker, an Apple car would look like this :
its wheels, windshield, wipers would only be Apple's authorized ones -- ok, for security reasons, we understand this
all the luggage or strollers you put in the trunk could only be Apple's approved models, sold through their shops"

On the other hand, if APple was a carmaker, cars would last for decades, would drive people in automatic mode, would provide games for children, papers for husbands and phones for ladies since the first days of carmaking...

Eric Amram said...

Yeah, but it's too late for Steve, it has already been invented!

(it's called the metro {;-))