iPhone apps: half-empty or half-full?
August 4th, 2008 | by jz | Published in iphone | 2 Comments
I don’t mean to only talk about the iPhone apps system — Facebook apps, Google mash-ups, and plenty of other emerging platforms share the fascinating if troubling characteristics of iPhone apps — but it’s an example that’s continuing to expand.
On the one hand is the NYT’s reporting that the iPhone Apps Store has pressured non-iPhone-carrying competitors (i.e., in the U.S., everyone but AT&T) to start thinking about opening up environements on their own phones for third party apps.
Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists are already salivating over the enthusiasm for cellphone applications. Their investments in this category rose 90 percent in the first half of 2008, to $383 million, from the second half of 2007, according to Rutberg & Company, a technology research firm based in San Francisco.
That would be a real shift from the landscape that Tim Wu mapped in his Wireless Carterfone paper, chronicling the difficulties that most outside developers faced trying to get apps onto phones. Of course, as investment and mindshare goes into developing mobile apps, the legacy PC app architecture rusts just a little bit more. And the mobile architecture, at least in the iPhone’s case, remains tethered: Apple must approve all apps before they can run on its phones, and it can pull the plug without notice.
Today’s case is the Box Office app, as reported by the Unofficial Apple Weblog:
Amazing to see a developer have no idea why its app has been pulled — and simply left emailing Apple with pleas for an explanation. (It’s the same configuration, in a way, as a Web site that finds itself filtered in China and can only guess what triggered the block.) For what it’s worth, so far the pulling of the App from the Store has not also included a disabling of the App on those iPhones where it is already installed.
Apple could do this right: it could start to think about how to relate to app developers in ways that give them calculable rules, notice and opportunity to be heard, and other elements of what lawyers would call due process before pulling the plug. It doesn’t necessarily have to — in the absence of monopoly power it doesn’t owe its developers what outsiders might call a fair shake; instead the shake is whatever Apple says it is and developers are free to write apps for other platforms if they don’t like it. But as with the Google death penalty, it can be difficult for the market overall to exercise discipline should the platform really take off — and “only” apps on the margin get targeted.
Update: As of September 1, 2008, Box Office is back. The developer apparently has talked with Apple but is not saying what happened.
August 5th, 2008 at 7:25 am (#)
Glad to see that a definitely generative idea can influence the market to become so, even behind a highly-walled garden — and my iron-clad self-esteem is glad Apple will soon have lower-quality competitors to despise, so that will still be better, and not just the only option that makes sense. ;o)
I’m really puzzled: I could understand the NetSahring thing, at least as a prt of the interference with the provider (my own, non-iPhone contract, has the same moral agreement no to use bluetooth, most likely not enforced by anything more then a consumption threshold); however, I cannot compute the Rotten Tomato thing: How come this isn’t the typical, ideal App?
Are there any influential competitors to Box Office? Why couldn’t they simply get they thing together, and rapidly throw their HTML and some noodles in a brawl to make a decent, bare-bone competitor? Could it be Movie theaters patrons that are unhappy with people checking out another film from within the room? No way. . .
I know I’m biased in thinking that corporate decisions tend to have a seemingly rational element within them. . . but isn’t that strange?
Maybe Steve Jobs is unhappy that Wall-E hasn’t got a better mark then ‘Bigger, Faster, Stonger’? (Personally, I’m sure that’s plain wrong: haven’t seen the documentary, but I just can’t understand how looking at bodybuilders for almost two hours get any close to Pixar greatness — a glitch, or a fake screen, obviously.) Is that enough to pull the plug? Then, Hell yeah, controlled-platform are a massive problem: I’m not so keen that King Steve’s fits prevent me from finding when and where to watch Wall-E for the third time.
August 5th, 2008 at 7:44 am (#)
A few comments in the truck load of blog-posts regarding that issue have mentioned that an earlier version of the App was crash-prone. Pulling the update is the exact wrong thing to do to resolve that — but I’d understand a snafu between an agile programmer that amends bugs in the same time-frame as a big corporation decides to pull it off preventively, and drafts without sending it an explanation that has to go through both the code-geeks and the legalize-translation.
Good news is the fuss: Apple is very stubborn, but users seem to be ready to argue loudly, based on a coder’s testimonial. This leave plenty of buzz heating-up to great any similar open platform.