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iOS Apps with Dropbox Integration Running Afoul of Apple's App Store Rules
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Sure did.
Here's my law: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a someone quoting Godwin's law approaches 1."
Microsoft offer free tools as well. In addition they offer the more powerful and pricey tools but those are way better than what Apple has and thus should not be compared at all.
Regardless, this Apple behavior is nothing new and we have already discussed it in great details. This is just another example of how this behavior hurts iOS users. Some will not feel it because they use iPhone primarily for phone calls and facebooking but for those who wants more from their smart phone it's been clear for quite a while that iOS is a crippled ecosystem.
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I already answered that before. It's about the better user experience provided by one consistent purchase method.
There's nothing stopping an Amazon, or anyone else with an extraordinary number of products to sell, from logging all the same information that a non-consumable would have at the time of purchase, while still using a consumable token. Apple provides a system that works, easily, for probably 99% of the apps on the App Store. A company like Amazon is going to have automated systems for adding new content, so it's quite reasonable to think they could also build out the infrastructure to handle consumable tokens with whatever additional features you think you get from non-consumable in app purchases.
What a ridiculous argument. This is about an unfair policy that Apple holds and the fact that you still can jailbreak on iOS device doesn't favor Apple's position at all since they want to make it illegal and are actively working on preventing it.
Ehm, no? They rightly want the development to be as free as possible because they know that their platform is worth less if there are fewer applications available for it, and developers want to have applications available for their platform because they deem it a good platform.
Both parties get a lot from the deal, which is something some posters don't seem to get and imply that Apple is offering far more to the developers that the other way around.
Well if they did, they wouldn't have any developers! If you didn't read about it, Microsoft is actually PAYING developers money to convert iOS apps to also support the upcoming Microsoft Mobile OS. If they started charging fees to get people to sell apps they'd never be able to catch up to Apple and Google.
It is indeed a monopoly. Competing os's have a checkbox to allow 'unofficial' apps from 3rd party sources. It is essentially given an 'okay' by microsoft and google.
If apple gave us such an option with iOS I would have no complaints.
I'm aware of jailbreaking (I won't ever use a stock iOS product myself), but apple goes to great lengths to prevent it. Thats why theres a 2+ month wait after each iOS version upgrade and often times certain stock apps like iBooks have problems. Apple does not want you to jailbreak - they want to keep their monopolistic app store.
Google does not care, thats why there is a checkbox to allow 3rd party apps.
iOS / app store is indeed a monopoly, at least when compared to the competition.
If it's unfair, you have a right to buy a different product. The point is, as a user, I appreciate the closed system and would find it unfair for me if they changed their policy now, despite having it in place for many years now since the very first iPhone.
That's the thing. There's nothing stopping a developer from working around the restrictions, but why should they have to? It's unnecessary clunk.
It's like with iBooks and the Kindle app. Apple makes it easy to get books into your library. You go to the store, find a store, click purchase, and there you go. All done within the app itself. With the Kindle app, I have to go through the website, buy it there, go into the kindle app, and do a cloud sync to get my book in my library. That's quite a few extra steps I have to take just because Apple wants to charge Amazon 30% for buying a book through Amazon instead of Apple.
Apple should be happy that I'm getting Kindle books on an iPad rather than a Kindle fire. They've already got me in their environment, which means I'll eventually be giving plenty of money to Apple at multiple points in the near future. Why do they have to gouge other providers for extra cash they missed out on because I didn't get that one book through their bookstore?
If it's a better user experience users interested in it would ask for it even in the face of competition, and App developers tend to listen to their customers. Not to mention that users might also want to have a cheaper alternative even if with a worse user experience.
While I agree that developers should be implementing iCloud, I would still like the option of dropbox.
Mainly because iCloud is far from ready to replace a service like Dropbox, as it is hardly integrated into OS X yet. Mountain Lion will change this, but it is still months away. And even still, iCloud will require you to use the same app on Mac, iPhone and iPad because of sandboxing.
So if you have an annotated PDF on your iPad in GoodReader for example, you will need GoodReader on Mac to access that PDF. And if you have it, you will have to open the app, open the file from you iCloud store inside the app, then "Export" it to another file in order to open it in Preview or Adobe Reader. If the file was in your dropbox you can just open and edit with any software on your Mac just like any other file.
And considering I don't share a lot of software between my Mac and iOS devices I don't think iCloud will really change my workflows, other than with Pages/Numbers documents. Eventually once there are good crossovers between Mac/iOS then it could be nice, but at this point those don't really exist right now.
Why would I pay Apple if I don't use their infrastructure ? The fact that Apple insists on pushing their service exclusively is what is greedy. Offering the service optionally to those who want to use it would be the optimal course.
I suppose the option to be there couldn't hurt. But I wouldn't call it a monopoly. More like a 'self imposed monopoly.' There is another ecosystem that provides much of the same function that you could join (Android).
The usual jailbreaking crowd did manage to crack it that first day, but they haven't released it to the public yet. In fact, there's talk that they're planning on delaying the jailbreak for the iOS 6 release so they don't have to go through combing for exploits again.
Yeah, jailbreaking is legal, but Apple does not make it easy for people to do.
Well MOST free-to-play apps do distribute through Apple and I think it's greedy for the developer to find ways to avoid the 30% charge. However, I do recognize that this Dropbox case is pretty unique. Unfortunately, the rules that suits most developers is harmful in this situation. But I wouldn't say Apple is greedy for it. If you made the exception here, it would become a logistical nightmare.
In my humble and anecdotal experience, that's what basically is happening. In my office we were all iPhone users until some started to be annoyed of this lack of freedom for a reason or another and went Android to never look back. Now we are roughly 50/50. After playing with Android I still consider the iPhone superior, but it's a actually a much closer call than I expected at least for me.
Apple isn't exclusive to the crowd. Game developers have tried hard to make their game hard to crack. Sony constantly updates its firmware to keep people from unlocking it to upload third party programs (and even took Hotz to court). And Microsoft is all about lock and key. The point is, as a developer, you have the right to force users to use the program the way you want it to. Among the first things you learn in programing is separating the public side from the back end. You also learn how to verify inputs. All of these work toward the idea of controlling the environment to funnel users to the experience you want them to have.
If open ware is truly the most ideal platform, Ubuntu would have become the dominating OS by now. The fact remains that computing is an ever changing field that almost demands structure to ensure user experience. I personally hated linux.
This isn't about the customers however, it's about the content providers and as we can see, they rather work around Apple's restriction with a less convenient solution where really, all parties involved loses.
So yeah, it's unfair.
In both cases the customer loses, playing along with Apple means higher price for the customer, working around Apple's policy means less convenience.
If the content provider plays along with Apple, Apple win big time and the content provider lose big time. Content provider works around Apple's policy; Apple and CP lose equally.
iOS / app stores are NOT MONOPOLIES, simply because the iPad/iPhone/Mac OS X are not monopolies. You can easily buy a different Tablet, phone or computer.
Apple has every right to ask developers to pay $1,000,000 to start writing apps for their devices. There is no 'right' that you have to let people write applications for your devices. Apple has every 'right' to only make Apps itself. Apple could hire 10,000 developers on it's own if it wanted to, and be the only developer of iOS apps, and never release an SDK or developer tools. There is ZERO wrong with this if Apple decided to do this.
This is exactly what Atari did in the early days, and then after the Atari 2600 became extremely popular, Activision produced it's own applications (cartridges) for the Atari by re-engineering it's OWN DEVELOPMENT TOOLS, without Atari's help.
This whole monopoly talk is very simpleton logic. It would only work if iOS had 90-100% of the Tablet/phone or computer marketplace.
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The last two Android devices I had a chance to tinker with didn't seem all that impressive to me. I found battery issues with one (Galaxy) and response issues with the other (Nexus). But for some, I'm sure its a small price to pay for freedom. But like I said before, as a user I do prefer the closed system.