The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord’s pleasure and fear his anger.
I hate it.
I hate it even though the iPhone hardware and software are great, because freedom’s not just another word for anything, nor is it an optional ingredient.
The big thing about the Web isn’t the technology, it’s that it’s the first-ever platform without a vendor (credit for first pointing this out goes to Dave Winer). From that follows almost everything that matters, and it matters a lot now, to a huge number of people. It’s the only kind of platform I want to help build.
Apple apparently thinks you can have the benefits of the Internet while at the same time controlling what programs can be run and what parts of the stack can be accessed and what developers can say to each other.
I think they’re wrong and see this job as a chance to help prove it.
The tragedy is that Apple builds some great open platforms; I’ve been a happy buyer of their computing systems for some years now and, despite my current irritation, will probably go on using them.
Tim Bray, “Now a No-Evil Zone”, ongoing, 2010-03-15
March 16, 2010
QotD: The iPhone vision of the mobile internet
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Pingback by Nexus One gets native AT&T support, hits iPhone on home turf | AboutAndroid.info — March 16, 2010 @ 15:41
So, Bray is basically saying “I hate what the company does, but I’m going to keep buying their stuff anyway.”
That’ll teach ’em.
Is the iPhone totally crack-proof? Has nobody out there liberated the machine from Apple’s clutches? Is it impossible to do so? Or does Apple actively hunt down and kill anyone who’s dumb enough to brag about liberating their iPhone?
Comment by Lickmuffin — March 17, 2010 @ 10:24
Precisely.
No, there’s a lively market in “jailbroken” apps for the iPhone. Every time Apple updates the iPhone firmware, they patch something that will cause jailbroken iPhones to fail, followed very quickly by a new exploit to re-enable the functions “fixed” by the update. I haven’t bothered jailbreaking my iPhone because there aren’t any apps in that marketplace that are of great enough interest to me to justify jumping through all the hoops.
Comment by Nicholas — March 17, 2010 @ 11:01
Tangentially related: http://leasticoulddo.com/comic/20100317.
Comment by Lickmuffin — March 17, 2010 @ 11:05