Mentioning Android Is a No-No In iPhone App Store 441
donberryman writes "Apple has told a software developer that its application cannot be included in the iPhone App Store if it mentions Google Android. The developer just wanted to mention that the app was a finalist in Google's Android Developer's Challenge." The developer complied with apparent good humor. Here is their blog post, which includes the text of the iPhone store's not-quite-rejection.
Re:AppStoreRejections.slashdot.org (Score:4, Informative)
You clicked through and made 2 root level comments. That doesn't speak to you trying to ignore it.
Re:We're all mind readers (Score:5, Informative)
And what kills me is that all of the iPhone limitations are caused by Apple being shitty company. Seriously, Apple, why the fuck can't I sync my iPod Touch on Linux? It's not that nobody is willing to make a program to do it; its that Apple went out of their way to make this impossible. It's the first and last Apple product I'll ever make the mistake of buying.
Re:We're all mind readers (Score:5, Informative)
I was rather irritated to find that my nice, new 16GB iPod Touch, shiny and gorgeous and amazing as it is, does not present as a USB mass storage device, unlike pretty-much every other mp3 player including most iPods to date. Great, so now I need to carry a USB memory stick with me as well? Thanks Apple.
Creativity, so long as we approve of it (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Uuuuh wrong? (Score:4, Informative)
the point of the removal isn't the word Android, or Google, but the whole phrase of Google Android Developer Contest.
That's not what Apple's response says at all:
we found that your application contains inappropriate or irrelevant platform information in the Application Description and/or Release Notes sections ... Providing future platform compatibility plans or other general platform references are not relevant in the context of the iPhone App Store.
So, yes, this is about Android as a whole, not just the contest.
Re:We're all mind readers (Score:5, Informative)
You can use libimobiledevice and ifuse to mount your iPod Touch under Linux, if that's all you need. You can use it as a generic mass storage device (no need to jailbreak either) as long as you have these tools.
For what it's worth, I understand Apple's decision on this regard. There is a void in USB regarding smart devices with onboard filesystem drivers which run an OS. Basically, there's no USB File Transfer Protocol, just raw block-device USB Mass Storage (which is useless for devices that run their own OS and can't just expose a block device - not to mention that iPhone OS devices use HFS, not FAT). There's a Picture Transfer Protocol for digital cameras, and Apple does support that, but only for pictures. They made their own protocol for the other stuff. Really, iPod Touch devices aren't music players, they're embedded computers with an OS which you just happen to be able to play music on, and there's no standard "USB file transfer between OSes" protocol.
What is inexcusable is their insistence in trying to cryptographically stop people from syncing their iPods and iPhones with third-party software. But this is one layer above, and it affects the music database. The underlying nonstandard USB protocol was a practical necessity (although, incidentally, their implementation is horrid).
Re:We're all mind readers (Score:3, Informative)
Here's a guess (Score:3, Informative)
Re:We're all mind readers (Score:5, Informative)
My Android phone has no problem supporting both Microsoft's Media Player sync and mounting as a mass storage device...and I happily would consider it more than just a music player too.
Re:We're all mind readers (Score:3, Informative)
Uncheck "Keep iTunes media folder organised".
Rant solved.
Apple is protecting users (Score:4, Informative)
You guys have it all wrong. This is a good thing. Apple isn't competing with Google. They are just trying to protect users from malware apps that turn users into evil androids! Have you people not seen Blade Runner?
Re:We're all mind readers (Score:5, Informative)
No USB protocol for smart devices... Um, no...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Transfer_Protocol [wikipedia.org]
Would work just fine for the data that the iPod supports.
So, that's not a good excuse for Apple causing this much pain. MTP could be added in a firmware update. And, the check-file updating could be done on the device if the MTP path is chosen. Yes, MTP users may be disadvantaged (by synching more slowly), but (for me anyway) it would beat having to start Windows XP(tm) in a virtual machines, and then launching iTunes.
Re:We're all mind readers (Score:4, Informative)
It's kind of silly that the phone is unable to access the files in the partition while they're being accessed by the PC, but nonetheless, I think it's a cleaner solution.
It's not silly at all. When the PC has block-level access, the OS assumes its file system driver has sole control over that partition. This is, at the very least, true of NTFS (and wouldn't be an unreasonable assumption for most file system drivers).
If they made it so that the phone and the PC could both access the partition, there would have to be provisions for simultaneous changes/writes, syncing issues when both systems load the same file, and many of the other complications you see with network shares.
It's far simpler to lock the partition for whatever system is using it than to deal with all the edge cases where simultaneous use can cause the loss, desyncing, or corruption of data.
Re:We're all mind readers (Score:3, Informative)
Re:We're all mind readers (Score:3, Informative)
Keeping things clean with simultaneous access really isn't hard as long as your API is file-level, not block-level (block-level concurrency is just about impossible without specific filesystems designed for that). Network filesystems have other issues to deal with that can be simplified in this case (e.g. latency).
Of course you have to lock against opening the same file for writes from both sides, but these issues occur in multitasking OSes anyway and they're fairly well understood. For example, iTunes uses lockfiles to prevent these kinds of issues.
The problem is that no such standard file access protocol exists for USB.
Re:We're all mind readers (Score:3, Informative)
No one can do it. The PSP presents its MemoryStick card to the OS, and in USB mode it can't do anything with it anyway. Android phones do the same thing with an internal partition. There is no standard USB protocol that allows the sharing of a partition between a device and the host OS.
Using existing mass storage protocols requires that whatever storage exists be switched from the embedded OS to the host OS, because they're low-level protocols that are designed for raw storage. This is a significant drawback for multitasking devices (and the iPhone is multitasking - no App Store apps running at once is just a high-level decision imposed by Apple by choice, not a technical limitation). Don't confuse this with all sorts of devices out there, including PSPs and iPods (non-Touch) and tons of cellphones which can go into a dumb passthrough mode where they behave as a glorified card reader or USB storage device.
Apple is evil about lots of things, but this isn't one of them.
Re:We're all mind readers (Score:3, Informative)
Don't be an idiot. Take the memory stick out of a PSP - it still works. Remove the data partition from an iPhone and it won't boot.
The PSP isn't a smartphone. It's a console bundled with a media player. It doesn't give a damn if you yank out its memory stick - all that happens is you won't be playing music or storing savegames. And it doesn't multitask.
Since you have a PSP, I'm going to assume you pirate games as it seems to be the only reason people have a PSP these days. Start a game from the MS. Now try to copy some music onto the memory stick using a computer. You can't. Put the PSP into USB mode. Now try to boot a game. You can't without stopping USB mode. THIS is what the iPhone can do - actively access data from its data partition (e.g. applications and their data) while communicating with a PC over USB. This is completely, utterly impossible to do with current standard (commonly implemented) USB protocols except for the specific case of media using MTP. The closest thing we have is USB networking plus some form of network file system, but it isn't ubiquitous or plug&play.
The design decision is to not cripple the device by making internal use of storage mutually exclusive with USB access. This is a perfectly rational design decision. Once you've established that, it turns out you can't do it using existing standards. When a perfectly rational, desirable design decision can not be implemented using existing standards, it means we need new standards, not that the company is actively trying to screw people over. You can blame them for not developing a standard and publishing it for others to use, but this isn't necessarily their responsibility.
The fact of the matter is that USB Mass Storage can only do what a USB memory card reader, memory cards, and a memory card-using device can do. You can bundle the reader and card (flash drives), or you can bundle the reader and the device (the PSP, most cellphones/players), or you can bundle all three (Android phones with internal storage, newer PSPs), but at the end of the day you're still swapping the card, physical or virtual, between the reader and the embedded device.