"It Never Ends!"

I gave a presentation at eComm on "Governance for Mobile OSs" this past week, I think the audience enjoyed it, especially after the droning quality and inability to finish within the timespan allotted shown by some of the previous presentations. One of the issues I pointed out was that developers face, particularly in developing for the iPhone, huge uncertainties that they cannot resolve independently.

The biggest of these has to do with Apple's position as the unappealable gatekeeper for the store. Developers, as shown by quotes last week, are understandably concerned at "keeping their fingers crossed and hoping for the best" after having sunk considerable design and development time into their application, knowing full well that Apple can give them the "Thumbs-down" for any reason, or none at all, and that--having done so--they won't spare a second's effort to discuss it with them or even tell them what the issue is.

So (as I actually predicted some time ago), extra-curricular "iPhone App Stores" are springing up, according to a story reported initially by the Wall Street Journal. Apple's threatening to play the DMCA card to stop jailbreakers--although reports are that at least one of the non-Apple stores won't require a jailbroken iPhone to install apps--but it remains to be seen how that's likely to play out.

In a story from yesterday, iPhone developers are "tearing their hair out" over the growing delay in getting applications approved for the iPhone App store: the wait has gone from a matter of days to months, even for free applications. And, of course, Apple doesn't return calls. And, not surprisingly, "developers, who are increasingly being discouraged by a process that in many cases prevents them from getting their first real foothold in the App Store. Without clear signs that Apple is addressing the problem, companies and individuals alike are questioning whether they should continue to produce iPhone apps in the first place." (My emphasis)

Like I keep telling people, it's a big world, and "Who's winning the mobile space?" won't be decided for a good, long time. Situations like the one detailed about show the downside of Apple's store model. Developers are clearly looking for a platform that treats them better...

Just a Few News Items That Caught My Eye

Proving that the world of mobile devices is indeed an extremely large and varied place, it turns out that it's evidently not possible to even give away an iPhone in Japan. (If you've ever used the iPhone's Japanese input, you might have an inkling as to why...)

(On a vaguely related note, Apple is pulling down all apps that enable "emoji" on the iPhone. If you want it, you'd better hurry on up and get it: Spell Number was a free application still available yesterday which enabled the Emoji keyboard....)

Also, Apple inexplicably trusts its iPhone developers more than Google trusts their Android developers: if you shelled out for an Android developer phone, you're not allowed to access the "paid applications" section of the Android store.

I'm going to be presenting on behalf of the LiMo Foundation at the eComm conference in Mountain View this coming week, and I plan to be attending (at least) Open Source in Mobile USA in San Francisco the week after that. If you're going to be around for either, drop a comment!

In other developments, I've come across an awesome organizer/notebook from the folks at X47, and a good resource for would-be learners of Japanese at KnowIt! Check 'em out. Fair warning: the X47 site's backend is slower than molasses and entirely in German, so if you decide to order something, you're going to need both linguistic skilz and patience...

I'm also becoming more interested in ELGG, an open source platform for Facebook-like social networking, as well as OpenPlans.org and The Open Planning Project....

The Store Story: A Follow-up

I'd noted previously, that Apple's opaque and inexplicable policies (soi-disant) about which apps make it into the App Store are a direct disincentive to developer investment in the platform. That's underscored by an article in PC World which talks to developers of ten rejected iPhone applications, and gets some relevant quotes:

• "We spent a lot of time and money on this product. It sucks to develop an app and get it rejected for reasons that you weren't aware of."—Patrick Alphonso, CEO, Swamiware
• "Their policies and approval are shrouded in mystery. Whenever an app is submitted, it seems like playing Russian roulette."—Hardy Macia, Catamount Software
• "Their reasons for banning us really didn't add up...After that, they pretty much stopped talking to us or returning e-mail and voicemail."—Sam Magdalein, Air-o-matic
• "In a word, I was upset. I tried contacting Apple to see if there was any way to resolve their concerns, but they never answered my e-mail."—Josef Wankerl
• "Apple's 'reasonable judgment' seems to depend largely on an individual reviewer's judgment rather than any simple-to-gauge metric."—PJ Holden
• "By the time you get rejected, you've already wasted all the development time and expense, and there's no recourse to get [the application] accepted."—Alec Vance

The Store Story

(This was originally posted earlier this week on the LiMo Foundation's MWC Blog...)

A lot of the news coming out of MWC this year seems to be about what isn’t there. In particular, there’s been a fair amount of commentary on the relative dearth of new Android handsets, the notable exception being the HTC Magic, coming out from Vodaphone before long. Other than the lack of a hard keyboard—the Magic is touchscreen only—it’s pretty similar to the G1.

What’s more interesting are the announcements around applications stores coming from various parties. Google has finally enabled paid applications on its Android store, a few months late, and Nokia has announced the Ovi Store for Symbian phones. In addition, Microsoft is going to have a Windows Mobile store (and reportedly brick and mortar stores as well) to push their mobile solutions. Stores, stores, stores.

Obviously, all of this has been driven by the success of Apple’s iPhone and its associated App Store. Apple, in a big comeback from their original position on development for the iPhone, has managed to do what prior mobile platform vendors, like Palm, always had a lot of trouble accomplishing: they’ve made adding software to your phone mainstream. Prior to this, while a lot of people carried “smart phones” of various kinds, relatively few ever took advantage of the capability of those devices to do things beyond the set of capabilities they shipped with. That’s a situation which is clearly changing.

Some interesting situations have already arisen, which display the difference between the various store “governance models”, if you will, as well as the security capabilities of the various platforms. Apple exerts tremendous control over its developers, to an extent pretty much never-before-seen, with the iPhone store. Essentially, developers for the iPhone have to do their work “on spec”, in the hopes that Apple will approve it for sale in the store. There have been several interesting cases where Apple’s either disallowed applications, or even removed them after initially allowing them for sale, on various grounds, as well as a number of situations around content—the author of an electronically distributed novel was obliged to remove several instances of “the F-word” in order to satisfy Apple that his content was okay for distribution.

That’s a situation that, in the long run, is calculated to provide a strong disincentive for major development projects on the iPhone: what organization is going to be willing to invest man-years of effort in developing an application that they may, ultimately, find themselves unable to effectively sell? In addition, Apple controls the effective marketing of those applications to a large degree, with its “Staff Picks”, and so on. The iPhone store is a market, but not a free one.

In contrast, the Android store is a pretty wild and wooly place, especially in the commentaries on some of the applications. Google exerts almost no control (although there are, indeed, terms and conditions associated with selling applications through the Android store, but they’re a cakewalk compared to Apple) over what gets listed there, which is fine as far as it goes. Where things get problematic is the intersection of the freedom around the store and the weaknesses of Android’s security model.

In the past few weeks, stories came out about an Android application which purported to “optimize” the memory usage of your Android phone. Sounds good, right? Of course, the app, when installed, dutifully reported the things it wanted to do, and of course, users all agreed to allow the application to do those things. The application then apparently went ahead and deleted pretty much every single bit of data on the phone, which I suppose represents an “optimization” of sorts—”There’s more now!”—but isn’t what the users of the application had in mind, certainly.

Both situations are caused by the same symptoms: lack of a policy-based security model. All Android applications are self-signed by their developers; all iPhone applications are effectively signed by Apple. However, neither of these models offer much granularity: either you install an application on your iPhone or G1 or you don’t; when you go to run it, either you agree to allow it to do whatever it does (implicitly on the iPhone, more explicitly on an Android phone), but once you’ve done that, if the application misrepresented what it does, you’re out of luck.

In contrast, policy-based models allow “levels” of signature, such that—for example—for an application to delete contacts, it would need to be signed by an authoritative source. Alternately, that specific capability would be brought out to the use for explicit approval, rather than a generic “This application wants to access your contacts”. This is one of the strengths of platforms—like the recently-announced LiMo reference platforms—which incorporate a policy-based model from day one.

Over the next few years, better security models, and broader availability of platforms which implements them, such as those being used by LiMo Foundation members, are going to be creating a real marketplace for developers, one which allows them to sell (or give away) their goods as they see fit, but also one which has some real consumer protection built in.

Greetings from Brussels!

I'm in Brussels, arrived yesterday for FOSDEM this weekend. Actually, FOSDEM semi-officially begins this evening, with the traditional "beer event", being held this year at the Café Délirium, near the Grand' Place. (Tomorrow night's the GNOME Beer Event, at La Porte Noire...)

I got here around 9 in the morning yesterday, was lucky enough to be able to snag a room at the hotel that early, and crashed out for several hours. I met up with my pal Carlos, who happened to be in town, but not for FOSDEM, yesterday evening and we wandered out to get mussels and beer on Boulevard Anspach, an excellent dinner.

I expect to be meeting up with a couple of other friends Monday before I fly back to the States on Tuesday. I should be getting a bunch of pictures from FOSDEM, I'll try to post the best of them here... I'm also going to be doing a little Mobile World Congress blogging on behalf of the LiMo Foundation week after next...

Who else is going to be at FOSDEM this year?

An Interesting Observation

(This is something that came out of one of those "You kids don't know how good you've got it!" rants, where I was telling someone who was complaining about having to "haul around" a 120GB iPod that, when I was that age, all we had were Sony Walkmans--Walkmen...?--that ran through four AA batteries in two hours, and cassette tapes to listen to, so that you needed a backpack to carry a good assortment of music, not to mention the spare batteries....)



A 4 gigabyte SD card costs anywhere between $6 and $50 these days, depending on its transfer speed and where you buy it, and it holds, roughly, 70 hours worth of music. A "standard" cassette tape held 30 minutes on a side (because, in the days of LPs, that was about all the gouged-in spiral you could fit on a side of a platter) and cost a buck and a half, easy.

So, to store as much music as that SD card would hold would have taken seventy cassettes--a sizable stack--costing over $100. In 1972 dollars. Backpack not included.

Neat.

(Okay, there's one thing you can do with LPs that you can't do with digital media, or cassettes, for that matter, but I've only seen it done once. Monty Python's Flying Circus' Matching Tie and Handkerchief was, to the best of my knowledge, the world's only 3-sided record album. It had two spirals gouged into one side, one "inside" the other, so that depending on where you randomly dropped the needle when you started to play it--do you have the slightest idea what I'm talking about, Best Beloved...?--it would play one "side" or the other... Doesn't seem like that big a loss... And in case you've been wondering, the storage capacity of a standard filiing cabinet runs around 50 megabytes...)

This is What The Future Should Look Like!

Actually, I want to mention an instance of what The Future is possibly going to look like, and shouldn't, first. I've commented in a variety of places about the problems with Android's security model, and how it essentially made any security problem the users' fault by asking them to approve what the application says it wants to do--in broad terms--on installation, without any policy component behind it at all. Lo and behold, here's the first instance I've come across of (possibly inadvertent) Android malware: a memory optimization application which (I suppose) optimizes the memory on your G1 by simply getting rid of all those space-consuming files, contact lists, etc. I suppose whoever installed it said that they were okay with it messing with that stuff. The article calls this a failure of the Android marketplace, but it's exactly what Google promised: completely open. Social engineering wins again. Caveat downloader.

Now, onto more promising and uplifting things. I use two travel tracking social networks, TripIt and Dopplr, and while I've mainly concentrated on TripIt (since it had the ability to organize my confirmations from airlines and hotels first, mostly), Dopplr blew me away last week by sending me a beee-yooo-tiful PDF report of my various travels last year (not entirely accurate, since I didn't update Dopplr with every single trip I took, but close). Check this out, I think Edward Tufte would be thrilled (you can download the PDF by clicking on the picture):

This really provides an interesting overview of things, in an immediately accessible way. One small addition I'd like would be a more explicit legend of the color-coding of destinations outside of the top ten, but that can be figured out from the map (which, again in Tufte-inspired fashion, shows both where one has been and how much time one has spent there).

I've found something very similar for my cell phone use, SkyDeck. Once you get it initialized to your phone, you get a very illuminating weekly email documenting a variety of interesting things about your cell phone usage. Not as snazzy a use of graphic design as the Dopplr report, but still interesting stuff...

I've replaced my Lenovo X61 Tablet with a 15" MacBook Pro, one of the unibody ones. I'm having some interesting experiences getting back to OS X for the first time in a couple of years after the death of my G4 Cube....