Back In

Last year, I wrote a piece entitled "App Store: I'm Out", which got a little attention. As strange as it feels to be in a position where I have to explain myself, I thought I should write about why I'm again working on an iPhone OS product.

If I wanted to have to constantly twist to justify the opinions of the past, I would enter politics. As it is, we software developers have the luxury of changing our minds as time and requirements dictate.

After the iPad announcement, I wrote a piece entitled "Future Shock", which got a lot of traffic. The reason I was so sure my take was solid was that I've spent a year working through my own future shock over the direction of Apple's platforms. The first piece I alluded to was my own future shock speaking: "They can't make us submit to app review! They can't reject our apps!".

Well, Apple can and Apple absolutely is. That ship sailed some time ago and I have reconciled myself to the idea that the old indie ways on Mac OS X are never going to be available on iPhone OS.

I do not intend to argue that the problems I enumerated about the App Store have gone away. They largely remain and, in some cases, are worse than they were when I first wrote.

The lengthy app review problem has mostly been solved. It's amusing to see tweets like "my update is taking more than 5 hours, haven't seen that kind of delay in ages". A year ago it was two weeks.

The problem of approval - as opposed to review - remains. In particular, the problem that you may be removed at a moment's notice with few channels to quickly remedy the situation is a significant business risk. Few businesses can afford to unexpectedly lose a week or more of revenue and make payroll.

The problem of app rejection - the idea that you build your app and only then find out if you can sell it - remains. It must be said that the number of apps falling foul of this is decreasing. However, it is not an insignificant problem, particularly when approval is not for life and can be withdrawn at any time.

The App Store continues to represent serious risk. However, in business, risk is the currency.

So, having said all that, why am I 'back in'?

When I first wrote  about my feelings towards the App Store, it was in the  arrogant and vain hope that it might have changed something. The direction of the iPhone OS ecosystem is now clear. To stick to an opinion regardless is to see the world as you would like it to be, not as it actually is.

Down that road lies the Free Software Foundation, and I have zero interest in finding myself in 2020 a bitter forty-something man fighting the battles of a decade ago.

The second factor in this was the iPad. When iPhone OS was just that - a phone operating system - it was obvious at the Apple future would be a combination of iPhone OS devices and Mac OS X computers. Post-iPad, that judgment is far from obviously sound. Having seen the reaction to the iPad from actual potential users, the secure future of the Mac OS as a general consumer computing platform is no longer as clear to me as it once was.

Be clear: I'm not saying OS X is dead, nor that Apple has no interest in improving it. I am saying that I suspect that the days of everyone buying a MacBook to get online are soon to be over. I've already written about how I see our three-Mac family turning into a one-Mac, three-iPad family over the next hardware cycle and I imagine that scenario repeated industry-wide over time. Already the ratio of iPhone OS devices to Macs is 5:2.

This feels like the settling of the wild west. The days of rugged individualism in computing are starting to close. The freedoms we had will still be possible but as with living in remote areas hunting and trapping your own food, few will care to accept those privations in return for the absolutes of liberty.

So where does that leave the small developer? In some ways, we have to shape up a bit. I don't want to say that we have to "become more professional" because, in large part, the Mac indie scene was one of the most professionally committed around.

What I think I prefer is the aviation analogy. We are no longer playing Burt Rutan and building our own aircraft. We're building components for the Boeing or Airbus ecosystems now. Nothing wrong with that - many people do a great job and make a very good living at that. What is lost is the software equivalent of the romance of flight.

I’m Scottish. Frying things and pessimism are our two main industries. It’s worth looking on the bright side too: the iPhone OS ecosystem has in its short life, brought a few incredible things too.

It’s undeniable that iPhone OS devices are incredibly stable. Last night I spent a frustrating hour trying to get my iMac to reboot into a functioning state after it crashed. That was an hour I had planned to spend in bed. In a post-iPhone, post-iPad world such failures feel even less acceptable than before.

iPhone OS is the first mass-market operating system where consumers are no longer afraid to install software on their computers (I’m not counting read-only media software platforms like games consoles here). In a conversation recently, a friend recounted a scene that he passed by in an airport. Four fifty-something women were sitting at a cafe table discussing the latest apps they had downloaded on their iPod touches. New software can’t break your iPhone OS device and, if you don’t like it, total removal is only a couple of taps away.

Finally, the devices are incredibly cheap by comparison with traditional laptop hardware. I could buy myself every iPad that comes out over the course of a three-year hardware cycle and still spend less than I did on laptops. The software is inexpensive too. There remain great strides to be made on discoverability and trials in the App Store. Still, it’s hard to ignore the fact that there’s now a large constituency of users just venturing into their first experiences of purchasing third-party software.

Simply put, I believe, the choice is this: the iPhone OS train is leaving the station in a big way with the iPad; much more so than when it was just for smartphones. I have to ask myself if there's a train that I would rather be on. I don't see one right now, and I don't see one coming down the track.

Apple Boots out the Booty

In The Apple Soft Porn Store, I wrote about the standard of some of the content in the App Store. To reiterate, my main problem was not that these applications existed but rather that the parental controls available were not appropriately filtering them out of listings and search.

Today, TechCrunch reports that Apple has started pulling "overtly sexual" applications from the App Store. This is good news for anyone trying to deploy iPhone OS devices in an educational context.

I do feel a little uncomfortable that some developers have had the rug yanked out from under them. That said, if there was one kind of app that it was absolutely clear from day one that Apple looked down upon, it was "adult" apps. Steve Jobs said so on the day he announced the App Store. Why those rules haven't been enforced I'm not sure (I suspect lack of staff effort), but they are being enforced now.

Additionally, I just did a little check and iTunes (on the desktop) now hides the screenshots of apps whose ratings are above the level set in iTunes' parental controls. That was one of my main concerns in the earlier post and Apple has addressed this, which is great.

An unfortunate consequence of this, though, is that developers whose apps retrieve content from the web will all have their screenshots hidden. It's not my concern right now but, in the longer term, Apple needs to develop a way to distinguish between "Frequent/Intense {sexual,gambling, drug use,violent} content" and "accesses the internet".

I should add that I don't really claim personal credit for this. Apple's emails to developers cite "numerous customer complaints" which, I bet, outweigh my complaints 1000-to-1. Having said that, it was fairly clear that the App Store as it stood was inappropriate for use in schools and, with the launch of the iPad, I'm sure that's a market Apple want to target.

DHH Gets Some Entertainment

Over at the 37 Signals blog, David Heinemeier Hansson bemoans the low-rent nature of the Entertainment category of the App Store.

Apple Reversing Policy on Smut Apps?

Following up on The Apple Soft Porn Store, Krapps is reporting (NSFW) that Apple has started removing and rejecting apps that exist to show pictures of ladies in various states of undress.

I have no information to prove or disprove that my bug reports, articles and the subsequent coverage on Ars Technica has anything to do with this policy change. There will, I understand, be an article in the Sunday Times this weekend on the issue (I was photographed for the piece on Friday).

My bug reports didn't request an App Store policy change, as much as a slightly tighter enforcement of the parental controls that already exist. Still, it's good to see Apple living up to their original intent for the App Store.

[Update] It strikes me that, although this wasn't what I asked for, it's probably less effort for Apple than trying to clarify the conflation of "contains smut" and "loads web pages" that the current ratings policy requires.

iPod touch in School

My thanks to Chris Foresman at Ars Technica for covering the issue of restricted applications being browseable in the App Store, even when restricted. I wanted to write a bit more about a couple of issues that people have raised in comments both on Twitter and at Ars.

That's not Porn, this is Porn

It was never my intention with this to get into a debate about the definition of pornography. I used the title "The Apple Soft Porn Store" to be catchy and memorable, but nothing here really hinges on the how-many-sirens-can-lapdance-on-the-head-of-a-pin question of "is it porn?".

The point is that these applications have been given an age rating for a reason. Many of these apps only exist to present images that are delivered inside the application binary and, thus, viewing screenshots of the app is little different to installing and using the app, except in terms of the number of images available, perhaps.

Kids Can See Porn On the Web At Home

Of course they can. What they can't do is see porn using my computers, on my network in my school and expect to get away with it. Plenty things happen outside school that aren't allowed inside school:

Young men have been known to sort out their differences with a bout of fisticuffs in the local park but we don't fit them for school-issue gumshields.

The senior pupils may illicitly partake of the gift of Dionysus of a weekend but we don't serve Beaujolais in the lunch hall.

That similar images are freely available elsewhere in society is to miss the point so completely as to disqualify you from the discussion. If I handed out copies of Nuts magazine in my classroom and explained to parents that there's no problem because their sons can get that from the newsagent too, how long do you think I would be in a job?

17+ Isn't Just For Porn

Apple's policy is that any application that may retrieve content from the open internet has to be rated 17+. Some people pointed out that removing all 17+ apps from restricted devices is unfair to those apps. I agree, but I also think that the number of age-restricted devices and iTunes accounts in the world will be but a tiny fraction of the total market.

The core problem here is that Apple's ratings and policy cannot discriminate between "frequent/intense sexual content" and "loads web pages".

Why Use iPod Touch and Not Netbooks?

This is about the only genuinely good question to arise from the Ars thread. There are a few reasons, which I'll discuss:

Firstly, I like NetBooks for education. I think they're pretty great for people whose hands are half the size of an adult's. The problem is that Netbooks are, largely, sold as commodity items in supermarkets.

We have 100 pupils in the school. When you phone up most places and say "I would like to buy about one hundred of your narrowest-margin items", the answer is along the lines of "jolly good, nip off to our website and use your credit card, there's a good chap".

We have a great relationship with our local Apple Store and, for us, that's a huge advantage. It's an advantage in pre-sales and it's an advantage in post-sales support and repair. Having a drop-off/pick-up repair shop 30 minutes drive away beats the pants off having to ship it off to some remote warehouse-based repair place. This is triply-true when you have 150+ devices under your command and simple statistics say that you're going to see a higher absolute number of failures.

Another reason that some teachers brought up is that a laptop of any size (even a netbook) quickly becomes the only thing on the desk. It's precisely because we want to use a range of high- and low-technological teaching tools that we were led to look at the iPod touch. A little iPod sitting on the desk alongside books, paper and pencil doesn't dominate the learning experience in the way that a laptop does.

Finally, there's the charging issue. We could reasonably expect to get a whole school day's worth of use out of an iPod touch on one charge. We're looking at putting the 4-port Griffin PowerDock into the classrooms so that kids whose devices are running low can juice them up during a lesson.

Speirs, You Suck and Should Be Fired

Well both of these things are probably true and, like Pete Venkman, I'd go quietly and enjoy my time in prison.