Thayala’s World

On May 29, the EFF published an article calling for Apple to make its iOS and Mac OS operating systems more open. The quotes below are from that article.

Apple’s recent products, especially their mobile iOS devices, are like beautiful crystal prisons, with a wide range of restrictions imposed by the OS, the hardware, and Apple’s contracts with carriers as well as contracts with developers. Only users who can hack or “jailbreak” their devices can escape these limitations. […]

Since jailbreaking is so useful, why doesn’t Apple let their customers (or at least their technically inclined customers) do it? One reason is the profits from the App Store. Apple keeps 30% of the money from each app or in-app-purchase sold through its App Store. That means that for each 99 cent app sold, the developer gets 69.3 cents and Apple gets 29.7 cents. Cydia has 4.5 million weekly users and earns $10 million in annual revenue, and Apple doesn’t get any of that competition. This is more like traditional software sales where consumers get to choose which store they buy their software from, and they can even buy it directly from the developer. Locking down iOS helps Apple maintain their monopoly on software sales for iOS.

I don’t believe that is “so useful.” I consider myself a power user in the general sense, but I’ve never felt the desire to jailbreak my iOS devices. I’m not aware of any of my friends that have a jailbroken device—those that wanted the ability to tinker with the internals of their smartphone or tablet bought Android devices.

I see at least three choices: buy an iOS device and live in the “crystal prison,” jailbreak your device and bear the consequences (e.g., not getting warranty support for your devices), or buy a device from another company. EFF even points out that there is a thriving market for those who choose to jailbreak their devices: 4.5 million users a week spend $10M annually at the Cydia app store for jailbroken iOS devices.

I would be more sympathetic to EFF’s argument if I felt consumers were without choice. It’s a free market: if consumers feel that they are being overly restricted by Apple’s policies, they can stop buying Apple’s devices.

Unfortunately, Apple is building more of the restrictions that it pioneered with iOS into Mac OS X for laptops and desktops. […]

The Mountain Lion “Gatekeeper” code has three possible settings; the default is that only code from the Mac App Store or Identified Developers is installable.

The Gatekeeper feature in the forthcoming OS X Mountain Lion release allows users to opt out of App Store and signed application requirements. I would also say that speculating on what the default will be on the released OS is premature, although I admit that the default will likely be a more restrictive option than “run anything from anywhere.”

I believe that even under the most restrictive option, users can selectively exclude apps using a contextual (right) click. I’ll probably be setting Mountain Lion to allow apps from the App Store and signed applications.

Once again, I’m not sure what effect this will have in the real world. Looking through the applications that I currently use on my Mac, the only apps that I use frequently that aren’t available on the App Store today are Chrome and Firefox.

There are a lot of issues with the iOS and Mac App Store, but I don’t think that how open the underlying platform is has anything to do with it.

Maybe I’m just enjoying my crystal prison too much to realize that I’m an inmate.

I view that we are in gaming now in a fairly big way. One of the reasons people buy an iPod touch is gaming. Some buy it for music. I realize that is not the big screen you are talking about. Gaming has kind of evolved a bit. More people play on portable devices. Where we might go in the future, we’ll see. Customers love games.

I’m not interested in being in the console business in what is thought of as traditional gaming. But Apple is a big player today, and things in the future will only make that bigger.

— Tim Cook, Apple CEO

In any conversation that Apple has with game developers, the bottom line is that Apple builds devices for the broad consumer market, not for particular segments—such as gamers.

If a developer doesn’t want to bring their game to an Apple platform, my guess is that Apple points at the thousands of games that are in the Mac and iOS App Stores and point out that there are plenty of others who will.

In my opinion, that’s for the best—ports of PC or console games to the Mac aren’t nearly as engaging or enjoyable as games that have been crafted by someone (or a team) that really understands the platform. I think that’s probably true for any platform, Apple or otherwise.

(Source: allthingsd.com)