Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Apple: openness can't be faked
Yesterday, I spent a few good hours trying to download the documentation of the iPhone 3.0 SDK from the Apple Developer Connection site. The site was down for almost the entire day. Talk about interest by developers for the new OS version... And inability for a company like Apple to keep up with it (hey, they are not famous for servers, right? ;-)My goal was to find the new Calendar API (we need it to provide calendar sync with Funambol). They claimed 1,000 new APIs in the slides. They built the entire presentation on openness to counter Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile and Palm. It must be there, I thought.
Unfortunately, it is not there. I could not find it. Either I am dumb (which is likely) or blind (nope, my vision is ok, I just changed glasses) or it is just not there.
I mean, 1,000 new APIs and none to give access to one of the two basic data elements in a smartphone (the other being the address book)...
Are they kidding me? Nope. They just play their cards. They do not want a MobileMe competitor on the iPhone. They will give you CalDAV, .ics support, even ActiveSync for the enterprise. But no access for developers. They might build something too good...
I know, I am bitter. But I am right to be bitter :-)
They are just playing the openness card and it is just a fake. Android is open, very open, almost too open... Windows Mobile has all the APIs you need. Same for Symbian, which is going to be even more open. BlackBerry has APIs for everything.
Apple does not.
You just can't fake openness, Apple . Even if you put names on a slide, it takes five seconds (or hours, if your site is down) to discover it is just words.
What I am sure about, is that they are going to pay for it. The lack of openness is going to bite them back one day. The world is going in a different direction and their tactics work when they are the only game in town. When they are not, it just relegates them to a small percentage of the market. I think it is just a waste, for such a fantastic company.
And I know, you are right, I am bitter...
Posted by Fabrizio at 15:53
10 Comments:
The world is going in a different direction... but is also scaring you...
It's always a matter of where the money come from and going to.
Comment Posted at 00:02
its ridiculous how closed minded apple truly is. Their products work seamlessly TOGETHER, but once you try to introduce a new hardware/software everything crumbles... They don't realize that what they are doing is exactly what Microsoft did, they're just doing it with better design. You're right, it will bite them in the ass, and open source FTW!
Comment Posted at 08:38
Davide-NYC said...
Fabrizio you are so, so correct in your philosophy but in the short term it does not matter. People just want stuff that works now and they do not think about the possibility that one day they will be vendor locked and hating it. I'm looking forward to Funambol support in fusemail.
Comment Posted at 12:14
Stefano Sanna said...
Fabrizio, you are definitvely right. The same happened (or seems so, if you prefer) to Bluetooth. I've read the documentation trying to find the well-known Bluetooth actors (devices, services, transport protocols...) but none of them appears in the "new APIs" list. There is a ExternalAccessory API with just mention Bluetooth as transport, but this protocol seems to be hidden by an higher level layer. That is: Bluetooth is there bu t we can't you to drive existing (and widely adopted) RFCOMM Bluetooth devices. Will we play LEGO Mindstorms with iPhone OS in the future? As you underlined: they wrote "Bluetooth" but we can't find it. BTW, Bluez also disappered from the Android API...
Ciao.
Stefano.
Comment Posted at 14:39
NO calendar API? That's just ridicolous....
Comment Posted at 10:09
I don't get it. Why do you need an API, we get _CalDAV_ support aka RFC 4791. What other mobile has that much support for open standards?!
Its like a request for an 'email API' (MAPI lol) when everyone just uses IMAP4.
Comment Posted at 14:49
Fabrizio said...
Hello,
CalDAV is just one protocol, but they do not have one for contacts (or Notes). While they have all three (and email) supported on MobileMe. It just makes it impossible for anyone else to build a solution that can be used by a consumer, because it is easy to configure (imagine being forced to put your server info, login and password in four different applications: it makes sense only for geeks). They silence the geeks because "it can be done" but screw up the consumers, that can't do it by themselves (unless they spend $99 per year on MobileMe, of course...).
fabrizio
Comment Posted at 15:26
Rob said...
This is the second "in yo face" post I've read from you. The other one regards AGPL.
("Stallman, push the AGPL stuff please!" or something.. )
There must be many more business men like you!
I've met Stefano F. at M-FOSSET here in italy. Nice person.
Wish you all the best.
I'll keep following your blog! :)
Roberto
Comment Posted at 11:47
jonlidgard said...
It's sad to see a company like Apple who have some great products and ideas being so paranoid about protecting their business model. Their empire has been built on the backs of thousands of open source developers & million of hours of coding time freely given to the community.
Without open source software their products wouldn't exist. OSX is based on FreeBSD, GNU compiler & debugger is used by XCode, to name jsut a few. Unfortunately they seem to have conveniently this. They are no better than Microsoft, just another big company that's forgotten its roots.
Comment Posted at 08:45
That's another thing the Cult of Steve Jobs and the Evil Empire have in common: The exploited the pathetically weak BSD licenses and stole code. Though the Cult of Steve Jobs did it a lot more. Of course, there are a few things they kept open (Because they were GPL'd.) All the BSD stuff went proprietary, including the kernel.
