Comment by cryptica
9 years ago
This is not surprising of Apple. They've always been a walled garden, that's why I don't buy their products. I like to own products that give me full control as a user.
When the iPod came out, I never understood why I couldn't just drag the music files directly onto the device and I had to get iTunes and use iTune's tedious interface.
Now they have the app store; another unnecessary restriction. As a developer, it's nice to own an Android phone because I can just run whatever code I want on it and I don't need to buy any special licenses, hardware or proprietary SDKs to do that.
The "walled garden" is what prevents the horrendous disjointed mess that is the Android phone market. Sure, for a guy who likes hacking around stuff, it's fun for you. But for everyone else, there is a thousand different phones, with a thousand different interfaces, all running different versions of the Android OS, that will never be updated by the phone manufacturer.
I understand where you're coming from, I do. But when it comes to a phone, I greatly prefer the standardized hardware/interface/OS over the free for all. I hate to use the "it just works" nonsense, but that is exactly what it does.
Working in the Enterprise, the iPhone is infinitely easier for us to troubleshoot, and manage. Because everyone is running the same thing.
The walled garden is not what prevents having multiple manufacturers of phones. Apple could easily tear down their walled garden and let users install whatever software they want on their own phones - and they'd still be the only one manufacturing iPhones.
Your argument seems to indicate that you just like iPhones better. Otherwise, I think you would have said "I'd prefer that our company either standardize on one model of Android phone or the iPhone." because both would have the same effect - things would be easier to troubleshoot and manage since everyone would be running the same thing.
Anyway, currently as an iPhone user I think Apple comes up massively short on basic features. For instance - on an $800 phone they're missing a physical message-waiting indicator light! That's completely absurd to me. Some others: You can't have multiple users (and this is big for the Enterprise). You can't put app icons wherever you want, you have to stick them all together in one big pile on the screen. You can't see the time a text message came in until you perform a non-obvious gesture. You can't see anything useful in the call history list until you click an item. You can't even change the default browser!
It's no wonder to me why Enterprise customers don't standardize on the iPhone - they'd be giving up all control to Apple.
> they're missing a physical message-waiting indicator light!
I do use an Android phone on a regular basis, and there it's useful, since it only pops up when important messages arrive (read: on-call stuff).
But my daily driver is an iPhone, and sorry - this would be an absolute mess with the amount of apps installed trying to notify me of things. It's virtually impossible to determine what notifications or messages are important. Is a waze notification that a friend will almost arrive important? Not really. Is a waze notification that I should leave in 10 minutes important since the traffic isn't optimal? Absolutely. Relying on such an indicator simply doesn't work the moment you have dozens and dozens of apps installed that all send you mostly mundane low priority messages, but from time to time want to tell you something you really want to know.
In my case, a light like that would be on all the time or off when you actually have a pretty important notification - which would mean you simply cannot rely on it. Notifications are already too complex, and at the same time too limited. Simplifying it into a colored light is just adding to that mess.
If there was a single manufacturer of Android phones, with the seamless ecosystem that Apple provides. I would absolutely consider their phones. Right now, it's a mess, and the reason Apple is the only alternative.
> The "walled garden" is what prevents the horrendous disjointed mess that is the Android phone market. Sure, for a guy who likes hacking around stuff, it's fun for you. But for everyone else, there is a thousand different phones, with a thousand different interfaces, all running different versions of the Android OS, that will never be updated by the phone manufacturer.
This is a non-sequitur. Fragmentation of Android OS versions isn't caused by Android letting you use web apps.
I was responding to the first two lines of their comment. If they are going to divert that way, then I'm going to respond to it.
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I just want to note that as a developer you can run any code you want on your iPhone through XCode for free. You just can't distribute it in the App Store without a license ($100 a year). You can distribute the code though, and users can compile and install it. This is how Kodi distributes on Apple platforms.
This is a newish change though, within the last couple of years.
You can run any code you want on your iPhone through XCode for free as long as you have a Mac, which is much more expensive than the app store license.
Many entitlements still require you to buy a certificate from Apple. You cannot, for example, compile and run your own VPN software.
Buy? I've never seen anything to suggest that special entitlements from Apple (KEXT signing on Mac, Network Extension usage on iOS, etc.) requires any payment besides the $100/yr developer program fee
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Not true.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression you would then be required to reinstall each app every 7 days. In addition, I've read online claims that they limit you to something like 3 App IDs per week on a personal account.
Doesn't mean you have to reinstall all your apps every week?
It's especially ironic once you remember that iOS 1 didn't even have apps: Steve said everything would be done on websites that would give a native experience...
Apple knew this wasn't true. They knew there was an public native SDK on the roadmap because web technologies didn't cut it.
The Stocks and Weather app were originally HTML/CSS/JS apps just like Dashboard widgets (note Steve Jobs actually describing these apps on stage as 'widgets'), but the performance just wasn't there so they got reimplented using native apis.
That's only because he didn't see the opportunity and the ux. Not because he cared about freedom.
So how do you do playlists when you just drag files to folders? What if you wanted the same song in multiple playlists? How do you do smart playlist? All of this is not as popular now as it was during the iPods heyday but it was popular then.
iTunes' UI for creating playlists and letting me add and remove songs from the device by dragging and dropping the files could be perfectly compatible.
What is a M3U file
If you're creating a m3u file you aren't just copying files to the player.
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>When the iPod came out, I never understood why I couldn't just drag the music files directly onto the device and I had to get iTunes and use iTune's tedious interface.
Because MTP is utter rubbish.
Really, people complain about iTunes? It's never failed me as slow as it is. Try using MTP...
The iPod mounted as a perfectly-functional Firewire disk, yet you still had to use iTunes to put music on it for it to be playable on the device. (It was filed away in obfuscated filenames...)
USB sticks became popular more than a decade ago, and not once have I had one fail to copy or remove a file by dragging and dropping.
NO one said anything about MTP. Copying files > anything.
Copying files... how? Emulating a FAT32 disk? That sucks. exFAT? Patents. MTP? Sucks. So how?
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