Apple CEO Steve Jobs saw fit over the weekend to drill down
into his company’s philosophy behind the iPad and the App Store—although the
venue for the discussion couldn’t have been further from the carefully
stage-managed events at which he usually appears. Ryan Tate, editor of the
tech-gossip blog Valleywag, found himself driven into a rage by an iPad advertisement,
and e-mailed Jobs in the early hours of May 15; Jobs apparently responded within
hours, touching off a wide-ranging e-discussion.
The iPad ad spot praises the tablet PC as “revolutionary,”
while many sets of hands demonstrate its touch-screen capabilities for Web
surfing and media viewing.
As posted on Valleywag,
Tate e-mailed Jobs: “If Dylan was 20 today, how would he feel about your
company? Would he think the iPad had the faintest thing to do with ‘revolution’?
Revolutions are about freedom.”
Tate’s issues, he explained in his May 15 blog posting,
included what he called Apple’s “lockdown on iPad apps,” including its
exclusion of Adobe Flash support.
Three hours later, Jobs responded from his Apple e-mail
address. This in itself is not unusual; the CEO has been known to respond to
developers’ queries with pithy one-liners on more than one occasion. Given the
early-early morning timestamp on the e-mail exchange, one can presume that Jobs
wrote his side of the discussion himself, with minimal oversight or
back-checking from Apple corporate; as with anything of this nature, however,
there is always the possibility—however unlikely—that Jobs was not the actual
writer.
“Yep, freedom from programs that steal your private data,”
Jobs allegedly responded to Tate. “Freedom from programs that trash your
battery. Freedom from porn. Yep, freedom. The times they are a changin’, and
some traditional PC folks feel like their world is slipping away. It is.”
Part of that “freedom,” Jobs implied, was the ability of
developers and publishers unhappy with Apple’s system to develop or publish
someplace else.
“It’s about Apple trying to do the right thing for its
users,” read another Jobs e-mail. “Users, developers and publishers can do
whatever they like—they don’t have to buy or develop or publish on iPads if
they don’t want to. This seems like it’s your issue, not theirs.”
In response to another Tate e-mail, this one calling Apple
to task for its “pet police force literally kicking in my co-workers’ doors”—a
reference to the April raid on Gizmodo editor Jason Chen’s California home, after
Gizmodo publicly dissected a lost iPhone 4G prototype—Jobs was
characteristically frank:
“You are so misinformed. No one kicked in any doors. You’re believing a lot of
erroneous blogger reports,” Jobs allegedly wrote. “As for us, we’re just doing
what we can to try and make (and preserve) the user experience we envision. You
can disagree with us, but our motives are pure.”
Despite Jobs’ insistence on the sanctity of his development
platforms—and the right of any developers to forsake it if they don’t agree to
his terms—Apple may face a potential federal antitrust investigation over the
language of its iPhone developer agreement. Quoting unnamed sources, a
May 3 article in the New York Post suggested that both the Federal Trade
Commission and the Department of Justice were debating whether to open such an
investigation.
At supposed issue is Apple’s mobile application’s policy,
which forbids the use of third-party development tools in the creation of apps
for Apple’s App Store. Specifically, a clause in the developer agreement for
the recently unveiled iPhone OS 4 stipulates that “applications may only use
Documents APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any
private APIs” and “applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C,
C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code
written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the
documented APIs.”
Because that reasoning excludes tools such as Adobe Flash
CS5, developers could potentially be forced between building an application for
Apple or for another smartphone ecosystem. Given the relative paucity of some
developers’ resources, combined with the popularity of the Apple platform, that
could lead the government to believe that the developer agreement creates
unfair competition.
Enterprise Applications News & Reviews 
