ORLY? Open source the iPhone?
It seems everyone has advice for Apple. Hell bent to resurrect them from that horrible abyss of having billions of dollars in the bank and making money almost as fast as it can be printed. Today, it’s five reasons why Apple should open source the iPhone. Let’s take a look at his five “reasons”, in slightly out-of-order execution, shall we?
Customers Love Choice
Open sourcing the iPhone gives customers a much broader selection of applications. Customers faced with a plethora of attractive applications when they visit the app store will spend money. More money make Apple happy.
Yes, because the App Store has been such a miserable failure, what with only 10,000 applications and 300,000,000 downloads. Total unmitigated failure. If only they had some quality software since Richard Stallman, et. al. are so well known for their “attractive applications” that people will pay for.
It Will Solidify Apple’s Dominance
Innovation will solidify Apple’s dominance, and I’ve seen little indication that open source is the hot bed of innovation in consumer electronics that the average person will pay for.
If They Don’t, Someone Else Will
If you mean someone else will let others run applications on the iPhone, sure, it’s already possible. If, you’re telling me that people will develop a viable competitor to the iPhone user experience, then no. I see no evidence of historical leadership in user experience, or in fact, anything but wrote copying of others that would make Microsoft blush. Will people use it? Sure, people also buy Zunes and Archos boxes, but the iPod still dominates.
They’re Gonna Have to Eventually
Have to? No. Might? Highly unlikely. Will be forced by a marauding band of light-sensitive open source zombies? Yeah … no wait, no.
It’s Good for Devvies, Non-devvies, and Apps Alike
Open source is becoming the default way to develop software in many industries. Why? Because a properly-managed, open environment leads to targeted, robust features and helps developers share code in a healthy coop-tition that helps everybody in the iPhone ecosystem.
Really? Any profitable industries? This is not to bad-mouth open source, as it has generated a lot of quality code, but in general, has not been responsible for large-scale innovation. Linux is not innovative technically. It might be innovative politically, but that’s a totally different world. I think open source probably isn’t a bad way to develop some applications, but it for infrastructure code? Give me a break. The open source world still thinks X Windows is a good idea.
People have fantasies. Personally, I want a unicorn that poops ice cream and whose tears cure cancer, AIDS and world hunger, but that doesn’t mean that it’s what’s “right” for others. Apple has succeeded by walking that very delicate line between open and closed. Totally open is appealing to a small segment of the population. What, in my experience, most people want is stability, predictability and innovation. These are not particularly things that the open source world has a lock on, or even many skills in. Once someone has demonstrated that open source can build viable consumer electronics—and that’s what the iPhone is—then I’ll be inclined to believe that it might be able to do something useful in this area.
Until then, Apple has opened the phone in nearly every way that matters. They’ve provided free development tools (if you’re on a Mac), extensive documentation, a distribution network and many other things. This is what most developers I’m aware of care about. Even if you gave them 100% of the source code, most people wouldn’t know what to do with it except screw it up. The one area that I’d love to see Apple open things up is in network support and more transparency in what the criteria for application approval is. These are things that actually hold back sales and developers, not some ideological purity test.
This entry was posted at 4:24 pm on 10 December 2008 and is filed under Mac. You can follow any responses to this entry through the post-specific RSS 2.0 feed.
>If, you’re telling me that people will develop a viable competitor to the iPhone user experience, then no.
You mean someone will create a phone that can actually call, use 3G, send and recieve SMS, with copy-paste function available? Yeah, that’s not possible.
But you’re right that there is only one Steve Jobs with reality distortion field that can transform poor user experience into something that customers appreciate.
Stephen As I said, that’s one of the major areas they need to work on. Right now, the approval process is a bit inscrutable to people, and can, on occasion, seem somewhat irrational. Heck, just saying why something was refused would likely create more knowledge, but right now my understanding is that developers just get a thumbs up/down, and no real rationale as to why it was turned down.
Alexy Really? “Poor user experience”? Have you ever touched an iPhone? And last I checked, the iPhone could call, use 3G, do SMS messaging (witness the fact that I do several thousand a month). Yes, copy-paste is missing, but it is, having worked for Apple, I suspect more due to the fact that they hate releasing a poor implementation of something. Once they’ve figured out how to implement it in a way that is trivial for people to understand then I’m sure they will.
And the only open source phone to compare it to is the OpenMoko, and it’s a disaster of epic proportions. Truly mind-boggling bad, as though someone intentionally designed the worst phone in the world to prove you could.
The iPhone is far from perfect, but for a wide swath of people who need a high-functioning phone, it is the most perfect of all the options.
> Have you ever touched an iPhone?
I haven’t, reviews are enough for me.
> And last I checked, the iPhone could call, use 3G, do SMS messaging (witness the fact that I do several thousand a month).
Apparently, Jessica Smith went to court for nothing (http://www.informationweek.com/news/personal_tech/iphone/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=210200044), and iPhone doesn’t drop calls (http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/telecom/2008-08-14-iphone-3g-connectivity-problem_N.htm), iPhone supports MMS or single SMS deletion etc.
iPhone is cute but buggy and lacks some popular features (of course, Apple thinks they are irrelevant, useless or can be replaced).
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think Apple should go open-source or be more developer (and user) friendly: they target small and specific group of people who value design decions more than features or technical advantage and Apple is good at this.
P. S. `I suspect more due to the fact that they hate releasing a poor implementation of something’ — actually Apple has a long history of buggy first releases of their products.
Well, I’ve long since stopped believing everything I read. I prefer hands-on experience.
You are right that it’s missing MMS, and many people are annoyed that this—not me, since I hate it, but that’s neither here nor there—and it tracks SMS messages as “conversations” so you do have to delete a conversation. That’s an artifact of the metaphor it uses. The metaphor is different. Does Google Talk allow you to delete a single message? No. Does Pigeon? No. Does Trillian? Adium? AIM? Yahoo? ICQ? No. No. No. No. No. A spurious missing “feature” based on a broken metaphor.
All phones drop calls, and often more because of 1) the network; 2) exact radio propagation issues at that moment; 3) decisions by the cell towers to power up and down their signal based on their understanding of the signal. If you’re aware of a phone that has never dropped a call ever, I’d be happy to hear, as would everyone else. My experience is that I drop calls in the same exact places that others on AT&T’s network do. This is an improvement, since Verizon didn’t even work at my house unless I held the phone “just so”.
Technical advantages mean nothing if they are not usable. That’s ideological purity, but that gets you nowhere. As for a “small and specific group”, well, with what appear to be over 10M sales, that’s not a very small group. How many OpenMoko phones are there? 10? 12? Perhaps 30?
As for bugs, I was actually referring to the conceptual implementation, not the specific code under it. The implementation of “cut and paste” is the specific mode, models and metaphors that are used by the user. The code can be fixed, but once a user and ingrained specific behaviors, it’s nearly impossible to get them to shift.
BTW, the presence of a lawsuit means nothing. People sue for all sorts of reasons, and many of the consumer lawsuits are targeted more for their PR and monetary capabilities than any actual legal reasoning. Is Apple’s 3G reception actually materially worse than any other 3G phone? Probably not. Can a case be made that in some situation, with some variables that it might get a worse signal, perhaps. But then, that’s true of any product. To actually understand this differences, one would have to probe the specific reception issues in a phone under absolutely identical conditions. The water content of your brain is one of those conditions, by the way. How many leaves are on the tree? Which way is the wind blowing? All these things affect radio propagation models, but are generally left out of simulations because you can’t work with that many variables. You just try and saturate the area as best you can given the origin points (tower) you have.
Chris: Now this is a rant I can agree with. :-)
Both comments and pings are currently closed.
i was more or less on board until this bit:
“Until then, Apple has opened the phone in nearly every way that matters.”
while i wouldn’t care to build the case for opening the phone, it seems clear that the iPhone application approval process is pretty fundamentally broken. the application store – 10,000 strong – is succeeding in spite of that development process, not because of it.
maybe the gate doesn’t need to be thrown all the way open, but the experiences of Google and others trying to get applications through the door would indicate that it, at least, should be more open than it is at present.
otherwise, solid points.