Coming To Reason

2009.11.28   prev     next

SO Apple changed their minds and decided to let Rogue Amoeba use Apple-copyrighted images in an iPhone app, after a Rogue Amoeba programmer publicly announced that he was quitting iPhone app development altogether over the app’s rejection. Sounds like Apple came to reason. Right?

Well, not exactly. From what I’ve read of this story, it seems to have happened something like this:

A developer is writing an iPhone app and decides it would be cool to have some Apple-owned images of Apple products appear in the app. But he knows that Apple’s iPhone App Store policy specifically says that apps aren’t to include such images. So which of these courses of action does he take:

(a) Make his own images or come up with some other solution that doesn’t involve showing Apple-owned images, or

(b) Ask Apple if it would be OK to include their product images in his iPhone App, then use them if Apple says yes, or

(c) Figure out a way to way to pipe the images from a Mac app (where they’re not prohibited if acquired properly) to the iPhone app, allowing the iPhone app to display them even though they aren’t actually stored in the unlaunched app. Then when — surprise, surprise — the app is rejected for showing Apple-owned images of Apple products, publicly announce that you won’t be developing anything for the iPhone any more.

News flash: The iPhone isn’t a do-whatever-the-hell-you-want-with-it desktop computer. It’s a phone, and in many ways it’s restricted like other smartphones before it, and like videogame consoles. Yes, Apple has made the smartphone a lot more like the desktop computer than a smartphone has ever been, in terms of how easy it is to develop and deploy apps. But it is restricted, and it is controlled.

Developers who try to do an end-run around what Apple says is OK, who apparently expect Apple to just throw up its hands and say what-the-hell-let-them-do-it, who instead get their app rejected, and who then, instead of simply fixing the app and resubmitting it, throw a hissy fit about it and stomp off and sulk — such developers may think they’re sending a message to Apple that it has to let go of its control over iPhone content and let it become an Android-like system. But I think those particular developers are really just sending everyone a message about how immature they are.

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