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Apple Facing Antitrust Inquiry Over Flash-to-iPhone Compiler Ban?

OllyW said:
But 99.4% of mobile app sales go to Apple. :eek:

app_store_pie_chart_640.png
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And that is the big thing everyone is missing. Apple has a monoploy on apps. They may not have a lock down on phones but having a lock down on apps hurts everyone else when they are force to choose between developing for apple or everyone else.
 
VulchR said:
All Adobe has to do is demonstrate that their cross-platform product is capable of running a simple program as fast as one coded in Apple's development environment and Apple will be in deep doo-doo.
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Then Apple is safe. Let's all go to sleep.
 
coleridge78 said:
There is a legitimate case to be made for cross-platform tools in some areas. Games are at the top of the list. They are qualitatively different from other applications in many ways but a primary one is that they use (almost exclusively) their own UI.
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Sorry, there is no case.

You are implying that using a cross-compiler inevitably leads to badly performing apps that have a non-standard UI. WRONG. Frankly speaking, you have no clue what you're talking about. Not a shred of a clue. You have never used a cross-compiler to develop iPhone apps and I'm extremely sure you wouldn't recognize an app that has been developed with one.

Furthermore you imply that native apps are somehow inherently better. WRONG. I could give you a huge list of apps that don't conform to UI standards, or games that run slow and bad. All of them natively developed. Most of those apps aren't downloaded by anyone simply because they are bad.

Finally, many things you state are up to personal preference. It is best to leave that decision to the individual and not try and make assumptions about what's best for everyone. The App Store is a huge success story with a very active and agile customer base. Apps that are bad are quickly drowned and good apps can be sold for a decent price. There is not the slightest evidence that people are somehow in need of protection from bad apps, even though there are tens of thousand bad ones out there.

Your main point is that limiting the development tools to some specific ones (that happen to be only available from Apple, on the Apple OS, producing only Apple apps) you would somehow create a benefit for the customer, but this claim remains completely unsubstantiated. To the contrary, it limits choice and creativity.
 
Rodimus Prime said:
And that is the big thing everyone is missing. Apple has a monoploy on apps. They may not have a lock down on phones but having a lock down on apps hurts everyone else when they are force to choose between developing for apple or everyone else.
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You are wrong. Most individuals who are downloading apps are downloading them from the App Store. That doesn't address the overall number or use of apps in the market, and it ignores the fact that market share (of some arbitrarily-defined "market") is not the issue.
 
Speedy2 said:
Sorry, there is no case.

You are implying that using a cross-compiler inevitably leads to badly performing apps that have a non-standard UI. WRONG. Frankly speaking, you have no clue what you're talking about. Not a shred of a clue. You have never used a cross-compiler to develop iPhone apps and I'm extremely sure you wouldn't recognize an app that has been developed with one.
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You obviously didn't understand even my first sentence, so your cocksure ranting is sort of ridiculous. Read it again, or just pretend I don't exist. That'd be fine too.
 
VulchR said:
Don't you have to pay to be a registered developer and then you get it for 'free'? In any case, perhaps you have a point.
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No. I have never paid apple a cent to develop their software - I just opened up a free account with the developer portion of Apple's website.

Downloading X-Code and the iPhone SDK does not cost you one cent. It never has. The only costs that you have to incur is when you want to distribute apps and if you want access to beta versions of the OS.
 
Speedy2 said:
Sorry, there is no case.

Your main point is that limiting the development tools to some specific ones (that happen to be only available from Apple, on the Apple OS, producing only Apple apps) you would somehow create a benefit for the customer, but this claim remains completely unsubstantiated. To the contrary, it limits choice and creativity.
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So, unsubstantiated claims. Would you like to substantiate the claim that allowing a second party (which is already an established, lethargic "monopoly" in their own space by the definitions people throw around here) to disrupt a development platform has ever resulted in benefit to a user?

I seriously doubt you can.
 
Rodimus Prime said:
And that is the big thing everyone is missing. Apple has a monoploy on apps. They may not have a lock down on phones but having a lock down on apps hurts everyone else when they are force to choose between developing for apple or everyone else.
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Exactly how does their "lock down" on apps hurt Nokia, RIM and Android smartphone owners (the majority of customers the market)?

It looks like their "lock down" on iPhone app specifications helps differentiate their product, which actually could increase competition in the worldwide smartphone app market.
 
ericmooreart said:
Apple CAN dictate what programing language is used on their devices.

Apple CAN NOT dictate what development software you use to compile the programing language
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...What is the difference? The made the clause simple on purpose to avoid considering endless 'what if...'s, and thus clear. I bet they are more concerned about which compiler you use rather than the source language, since it is the compiler which performs all the optimizations, and Xcode is the IDE which they control and can improve (rely on Adobe to fix bugs, anyone?).

But they also require C,C++ or Objective-C (or a mix of them) since these have bindings to the Cocoa API, which is the one with real access to the OS features and therefore hardware. They certainly don't want to spend the resources to be supporting every Python out there. I don't blame them.
 
Anti-competitive behaviour would happen if some company cannot compete. "Compete" in that situation means "attempt to produce competitive products that customers would buy or not buy on their merits". If you try to compete with Ferrari but just can't build cars as fast as theirs, that isn't "not able to compete" in the sense of anti-competition laws, it is "competing but without success".

iPhone developers have no reason to complain. Any iPhone developer can compete with every other iPhone developer; they all can use the same tools, and the better developers will win. Maybe they don't like not to be able to use a Flash-to-iPhone compiler, but it doesn't harm competition between iPhone developers at all.

Can other phone manufacturers complain? I don't think so. It should help them in one way; developers who absolutely want to use Flash will exclude the iPhone from their plans, writing more software for other phones.

The company that _could_ possibly complain is Adobe, because Apple stops them from competing in one segment of the "development tools for mobile devices" market.
 
Rodimus Prime said:
And that is the big thing everyone is missing. Apple has a monoploy on apps. They may not have a lock down on phones but having a lock down on apps hurts everyone else when they are force to choose between developing for apple or everyone else.
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There are enough viable alternatives for people to make this not even close to a monopoly. Have you seen the amount of growth the android app store has managed in the past few months?

In addition consider the printer analogy: should HP be forced to make their printer drivers and ink cartridges compatible with Canon's? Same situation...
 
hitekalex said:
Thank you.. finally someone with common sense and knowledge of the subject matter.. welcome change from a bunch of Jobs' monkeys who just parrot his "party line".

Whether Apple's recent actions are "legal" or not will (hopefully) get tested in the court of law. However, legality of their recent business practices aside, they have certainly done a lot to alienate even their most loyal customers, developers and media..

There are different ways to do business, and Apple's secrecy, paranoia and desire to exercice 100% control over their product and what the customers can do with them will ultimately hurt them in the market place. The only question is if this will happen due to legal means or just people abandoning their platforms in droves for other alternatives..
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At this point there must be millions of "Jobs monkeys" out there that want only one thing: an iPhone and a cellular network that functions flawlessly. They probably don't give a s**** about a piece of junk like flash.

There are sites using flash that are for me as a mac user a bad user experience with anything slower than a Intel Core Duo processor. Which is certainly not because a G4 is slow, but flash using more ressources than it should.
 
mox358 said:
The problem is CS5 becomes the platform, then Apple's innovations in the OS upgrades are at the mercy of when Adobe will support them, and anything that's not available on Android, WinMo, etc.. will not be supported to keep cross platform compatibility. Adobe is playing for all the marbles here.
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Look, if CS5 becomes THE platform(which I don't think it will), it means that it's providing a need that Apple's own SDK isn't. So if Apple wants to convince developers to use its own, it needs to fill the niche that other SDK is providing. Competition will ultimately benefit the users.

Case and point: the reason why Unity3D is popular is because it's a good 3d/game framework that Apple's own SDK doens't full fill.
 
tdmac said:
But if there was MANY apps that had issues then people would start to take it out on the device. There would be no reason to have the device if all it can do is run apps that have issues.
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You are implying that thousands of bad apps would flood the App Store once cross-compilers are allowed. But oh wait. There ARE ALREADY thousands of bad apps. And people still love the iPhone and the App Store. This must be a miracle.

Also, you are totally buying that crap that cross-compiled = bad. Do you also believe everything else that corporate people tell you?
 
Damn! Apple is abusing its monopoly on Mac OS X and they won't let me run my copy of freebie.exe that I just got on Tucows!!! I'll sue them! :eek:
 
Speedy2 said:
You are implying that thousands of bad apps would flood the App Store once cross-compilers are allowed. But oh wait. There ARE ALREADY thousands of bad apps. And people still love the iPhone and the App Store. This must be a miracle.

Also, you are totally buying that crap that cross-compiled = bad. Do you also believe everything else that corporate people tell you?
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Um, last I heard that "write once run anywhere!" polka-dotted unicorn was a favorite of the corporate types. Not the other way around. You seem to not be very familiar with the software world. What blogs are you plagiarizing?

Also, your continued, ranted logic that goes something like: "THERE IS ALREADY BAD THING, THUS WE SHOULD NOT WORRY ABOUT ENCOURAGING MORE BAD THING TO MORE EASILY OCCUR!" is, to put it mildly, fallacious.
 
BaldiMac said:
Again, Microsoft did not get in trouble for bundling IE. They got in trouble for illegally abusing their monopoly in order to prevent competition.
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How did Microsoft prevent Competition? You can install any other browser you want...
 
gnasher729 said:
The company that _could_ possibly complain is Adobe, because Apple stops them from competing in one segment of the "development tools for mobile devices" market.
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I dunno - that market sounds rather niche - Adobe could create tools for other cellular handsets (like android). It's just that they cannot play in the "development tools for Apple mobile devices" market. That reminds me of the Psystar anti-trust argument of Apple owning a monopoly of the Mac compatible computer market or whatever. And we know how that argument turned out.
 
Speedy2 said:
Other popular and widely-used cross-compilers don't need anything like a VM.
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Cross-compilers are not even remotely the issue here. Why do you think they are? Because you read about them somewhere once and they sound like something smart people talk about?
 
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