Finally, a sensible article from the media.
- Thread starter thomasfxlt
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What about Jobs' "Cat and mouse" statement?
FreeState
macrumors 68000
That cat and mouse statement was about unlocking phones - not hacking them for apps.
see: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,137330-c,iphone/article.html
Once again people are tossing two issues into one basket. There is an huge difference between unlocking phones for different cellular companies and hacking them for apps for the owner/user.
One Apple legally must (at least publicly) defend because they are contractually obligated to and it costs them money. The other does not and can only benefit the owner/user.
Telp
macrumors 68040
Me too
. I do wish it had some things that it doesnt as of yet, and im always ready and looking forward to a new update to it, but that doesnt make me love it any less.
D1G1T4L
macrumors 68000
I stood in line to pay $600 for an unhacked iPhone with no 3rd party apps. I loved it then.
Guess what..........I still love my iPhone.
/"\/oo\/"\
macrumors regular
good little read
kdarling
macrumors P6
What a bunch of you know what in that article. Kids.
It's obvious that Apple simply doesn't have the brightest people working on the iPhone right now.
I agree, if they wanted to brick phones, they could do a better job. But they sure didn't want to do that, not with possibly tens of thousands of unlocked phones. Talk about a worldwide (not necessarily in the US) PR disaster.
OTOH, I've said before that they could've also gone the other way and easily not mucked up any mod'd or unlocked phones at all. They didn't do that either. So either they did it on purpose (probably not) or they've just got junior programmers working on it.
It's obvious that Apple simply doesn't have the brightest people working on the iPhone right now.
I agree, if they wanted to brick phones, they could do a better job. But they sure didn't want to do that, not with possibly tens of thousands of unlocked phones. Talk about a worldwide (not necessarily in the US) PR disaster.
OTOH, I've said before that they could've also gone the other way and easily not mucked up any mod'd or unlocked phones at all. They didn't do that either. So either they did it on purpose (probably not) or they've just got junior programmers working on it.
FreeState
macrumors 68000
Did you read the article?
The software on the phone - the actual OS - was a temp hack until the last update. So the hacks were written for unfinished software.
D1G1T4L
macrumors 68000
You honestly fell there are tens of thousands of unlocked iPhones? Tens of thousands?
Only a million had sold right after the price drop.
Junior programmers to close easy flaws that were left open? Why criticize the Apple programmers? Because they didn't do more?
Lol. Since when has wired.com's opinion meant anything? And to make their point, they use a blog contributor opinions?
Great article. Makes lots of sense.
I wonder what the ETA is on a "finished" iPhone OS? Clearly this effort will ramp up post Leopard. There was the rumor of a full iWork Suite on iPhone AND full Cocoa apps certified by Apple around the Leopard launch. That rumor came 2 days before the iPhone launch. So maybe we'll see a "finished" iPhone before years end?
If not, January MacWorld perhaps?
I wonder what the ETA is on a "finished" iPhone OS? Clearly this effort will ramp up post Leopard. There was the rumor of a full iWork Suite on iPhone AND full Cocoa apps certified by Apple around the Leopard launch. That rumor came 2 days before the iPhone launch. So maybe we'll see a "finished" iPhone before years end?
If not, January MacWorld perhaps?
/"\/oo\/"\
macrumors regular
I don't think it's so much that apple doesn't have the brightest people working on the iphone or that "junior" programmers are working on it. More likely, IMO, is that the talent at apple is just stretched really thin right now. A lot of the same people are probably working on the software having to do with Leopard, the "touch" version of OS X, the ipod OS and patches/updates on top of that. That's quite a lot to deal with- all of it probably fairly challenging work.
kdarling
macrumors P6
/"\/oo\/"\;4280457 said:
Perhaps, but inexcusable for long, what with the millions of extra dollars they're raking in monthly from user fee royalties. Time to hire talent !
Maybe also time to throw some of that money back (in secret) at the third party programmers and get some cool new apps to officially download.
aristobrat
macrumors G5
By blog contributor opinions, are you talking about Erica Sadun from TUAW? She's been hacking into the iPhone since day#1, creating and releasing many applications along the way. Of any of the opinions flying around the blogosphere now, hers is one that most people would actually give weight to.
So if this is correct "The new iPhone software appears to be a ground-up rewrite, unrecognizable under the hood to the older version", then it sounds like Apple's got some fairly talented people busy hacking away for them, no?
Sobe
macrumors 68000
For some people unless and until 3rd party applications are fully embraced, and to a lesser extent unlocks, the answer to your question would be "no."
Well, I think that the technique that helps unlocking the iPhone will be closely related, or depend on, the the technique used to hack the phone to install 3rd party applications. So therefore, most likely 3rd party applications will always suffer at every firmware update... regardless of Apple's statements.
That's not connected to the quality of the dev team.
They could be brilliant coders, they could be awful (unlikely) - that's not what drives sales and marketing policies.
Anyway...
The possibility that an SDK will come, but can't be shipped yet due to the code base not being stabilised, is certainly plausible.
I've worked on systems where, in rush to get to market, we've skipped the time consuming process of abstracting apps from platform - written it all as one big soup. Rebuilding something with the a rigorous level of abstraction is a usually a significant rewrite - maybe that's where we're heading, either with some of the work already done in 1.1.1, or that it's still all to do.
Either way I think, in the long term, a more open verson will happen. I'm sure many of us remember the stand off with the original mac - it didn't last forever.
CWallace
macrumors G5
It seems incredulous that the iPhone development team could write "Alpha-level" software for the initial release over a period of at least six months, if not longer, with 1.0.x and suddenly in 60 days produce clean code with 1.1.1.
More likely Apple figured that what they had was good enough and shipped it to meet internal dates. They didn't plan on the iPhone community to almost instantly gain access to the source code on the iPhone through the iPhone itself and start to modify it by identifying security flaws in the source code and exploiting them.
So pretty quickly, Apple learned they needed to "shore up" the codebase and proceeded to fix the security holes many third-party apps - including all of the "unlocks", I believe - were using to get onto the iPhone and execute their code. Alas, this physically wiped them out and off the iPhone.
Now, where I do take exception to Apple's claims that "we don't mind third-party apps" is with things like iToner, which did not exploit any security loopholes to work and did not even write data to anywhere but the "user" area where data like music, pictures, e-mail, and such are stored. Ambrosia Software played it "straight and square", and were hosed not once, not twice, but three times by Apple - first with two iTunes updates and then with the 1.1.1 upgrade.
More likely Apple figured that what they had was good enough and shipped it to meet internal dates. They didn't plan on the iPhone community to almost instantly gain access to the source code on the iPhone through the iPhone itself and start to modify it by identifying security flaws in the source code and exploiting them.
So pretty quickly, Apple learned they needed to "shore up" the codebase and proceeded to fix the security holes many third-party apps - including all of the "unlocks", I believe - were using to get onto the iPhone and execute their code. Alas, this physically wiped them out and off the iPhone.
Now, where I do take exception to Apple's claims that "we don't mind third-party apps" is with things like iToner, which did not exploit any security loopholes to work and did not even write data to anywhere but the "user" area where data like music, pictures, e-mail, and such are stored. Ambrosia Software played it "straight and square", and were hosed not once, not twice, but three times by Apple - first with two iTunes updates and then with the 1.1.1 upgrade.