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.)
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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'.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
[+] [-] lukifer|14 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] Pewpewarrows|14 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] wslh|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] quotemstr|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] idspispopd|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wmeredith|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] astrodust|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] shinratdr|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] junto|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rimantas|14 years ago|reply
Good thing you don't, because you don't know what monopoly is not to mention knowing what's legal and what's not.
[+] [-] a3d6g2f7|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] js4all|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lucian1900|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tobiasbischoff|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cbryan|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cooldeal|14 years ago|reply
>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.
[+] [-] tobiasbischoff|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] btrask|14 years ago|reply
Edit: And more broadly, reverse engineering is not a crime.
[+] [-] api|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tikhonj|14 years ago|reply
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'.
[+] [-] PythonDeveloper|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roc|14 years ago|reply
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|reply
[+] [-] clarky07|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisLTD|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DigitalSea|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] droithomme|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chj|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] fpgeek|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] thought_alarm|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] MiguelHudnandez|14 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] beedogs|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chj|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PythonDeveloper|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] raganwald|14 years ago|reply
Yes! Sharecropping in the Orchard:
http://weblog.raganwald.com/2004/11/sharecropping-in-orchard...
[+] [-] ryannielsen|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cletus|14 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] jsz0|14 years ago|reply
AirTunes came out in 2004 and AirFoil followed a year later as a software accessory compatible with AirTunes.
[+] [-] bluthru|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kalleboo|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] calinet6|14 years ago|reply