Utter rot.

This used to happen all the time in the 1980s and 1990s, before the DoJ anti trust lawsuit really got rolling.

It was most obvious in office apps (ever wonder where the third-party spelling checkers and grammar checkers went? Or the standalone mailmerge applications? Microsoft added their functionality to Word and killed an entire add-on market at a stroke each time they did so), but a load of that stuff happened in Windows too (the graphical shell that became an OS in its own right). The most flagrant late example was web browsing; the most recent one I can think of (not being a Windows user) was their antivirus/malware add-in.

(Honestly ... young 'uns these days ... wanders away mumbling into beard and waving walking stick in the air.)

Marco needs to get over his fears[1] and store the offline data in Documents. It is user generated and is absolutely not transient nor re-downloadable given that a core feature of Instapaper is offline reading.

Apple will get a deluge of bug reports and questions from all app devs that make apps that need to cache content for offline use - but not back it up or store it in iCloud - and will rectify the situation in some way. (I don't think Instapaper is in that camp but that's kind of beside the point.)

I know that most people hold Apple to a higher standard than many other companies but let's not forget Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." This is merely an oversight. Apple is never this hostile to the user experience, and the current guidelines make for a positively horrid user experience. It will be rectified. Is there a short-bets website? I'll make that bet any day.

[1] I think he was correct not to take chances in getting the first iOS 5 version out, but I hope that the minute it was "Processing for App Store" he had a build ready for submission that stores content in Documents to feel out the review team's reaction to it.

I won't excuse Apple for acting like a King, but I think Jeff should find another poster boy for benevolent dictators. Microsoft is famous for steamrolling third-party developers, both from their applications group and their systems group.

I think this rant would read better if it complained about ALL proprietary platforms and used Apple as an example, rather than disingenuously implying that they are the rotten fruit in the barrel.

p.s. Joel Spolsky once said that companies always try to "Commoditize their complements." If you as a developer can create something that adds value to the platform in a broad way, it's inevitable that the platform owner is going to want to commoditize it, either by giving it away or making it easy for your competition to drive prices down to negligible levels.

Building it into the platform is the ultimate commoditization.

I'm not trying to defend Microsoft. It's all too clear they have been very anti-competitive. But if windows had the controls on it that apps on iOS had we'd be hearing folks call for criminal prosecutions.

I understand the gee whiz factor of Apple. I own a bunch of Apple stuff and I love their design. I also understand that if you don't control your garden, all kinds of weeds grow in there. But geesh, folks, Jeff is correct. Perhaps this is the best future we could hope for, but it is an extremely sub-optimal destination compared to where we thought we were going.

The problem is, as devs we are spoiled by the web, where you can just push out new code that says or does whatever you want it to without any consequence because the web is a "relatively" safe runtime, so nobody cares.

We are like children who grew up with a silver spoon in our mouth and we've been asked to endure plastic. Sure, it's still a spoon, but it's not silver and that pisses us off.

2. The cleanup feature doesn't really support his point. If I store data on my phone and the phone deletes it all without warning when it thinks I have too much, that's not protecting me at the expense of the app developer - that's just plain screwing me and the developer at the same time. Honestly, I find it incomprehensible that any professional could possibly have considered it a good idea, and I think it's indicative of Apple's manic secrecy that it wasn't headed off early instead of being ignored until release.

I know Apple's doing really well in the market lately - by innovating quicker than anybody else, which has been fantastic for everyone. But in the long run, this arrogance is not going to be good for them. It shot them in the foot for two decades with the Mac, and it's going to bite them now.

I understand the impulse to look at however many millions of IOS devices and to immediately want to get into that market, but the long tail is not a comfortable place to be in a land of 99c standard prices. Having an arbitrary and capricious landlord makes it worse.

Even big apps will eventually include features initially provided by plugins. See Photoshop or Jira.

Not to mention the strategy of web giants like Google who will purchase existing successful commercial companies and the offer their product for free, thus crippling entire markets. See Google Analytics, Earth and Sketchup.

I know that the Android equivalent has problems (piracy, for instance), but I'd rather have that than something completely locked down.

If you develop something that is just an 'add on' or a missing feature you are setting yourself up for eventual trouble.

Such products have a life cycle and you can't reasonably expect the situation to continue unchanging forever.

If so, did they actually ask Marco before they took that link out?

If so, did Marco ask them to take it out?

And, if he did - which, having heard Marco speak on this topic, I do not assume, but merely suppose - was that the right call?

My understanding was that an App Store developer might kill for that kind of free publicity. Could it be, for example, that Apple stopped linking Instapaper so as to avoid playing favorites? Might one of Instapaper's competitors have complained about that link?

But Apple is pushing the envelope: they are the first platform to break the "specific device limit". Android competes on phones, Windows on the desktop, Amazon with content, Samsung on hardware. But Apple is everywhere. And they are not the underdog anymore. This is Tim's Cook real challenge, and we wish him luck.

You know what I also don’t understand? What this has to do with the big open vs. closed debate. Apple implemented a new feature in their own browser. Google can just as well implement the exactly same feature in their browser. Open vs. closed doesn’t figure into this. At all.

That whole cleaning behavior of iOS debate is just stupid. Apple screwed up. So what.

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePla... http://weblog.raganwald.com/2004/11/sharecropping-in-orchard...

Google can arbitrarily and capriciously exclude them from their index. When google excludes you from the index, there is no appeal, there is no explanation, and, unlike Apple, google will not publish a set of (reliable) rules. (It gives a lot of advice but is inconsistent.)

Also, like Apple, if you are not able to get in the big leagues for distribution, you can distribute your product thru other, less popular channels that are more of a hassle.

Unlike Apple, however, which give you explicit feedback on the feature that was the problem (with screenshots if needed) and always cites chapter and verse from the handbook for the exclusion, google will not tell you why, or give you any way to resolve it.

With Apple, you can resolve the issue and resubmit it. Your app will be on the store in about 7 days. With google, even if you figure out what the problem is, and you resolve it, you have no way of knowing if you'll ever be let back into the index.

Well, yes, and that's why we had crappy phones for years before iPhone and Android arrived, as noted by Jeff Atwood. I think it shows again that, not unlike the first PCs and their open slots for third-party cards, openness is the right move.

Many people here seem to renounce to this, mostly because Apple's walled garden is currently at a pinnacle, but in my opinion it is an accident. Apple's products manage to grasp most of the attention around for emotional reasons, and some forget that the future is not built on closed formats, closed markets, etc. I am surprised that it is not so obvious, especially for US citizens. The Web builds on open protocols. The PC-era built on the fact that you could open the box and plug things of your doing in it. Wikipedia, which everyone uses constantly and forget, is an open community task.

My two years-old kid is learning a lot, but it is not linear, he sometimes go backward a bit. I think we are in this backward pulse, with everyone suddenly dissmissing the possibility to open, change, modify softwares, in exchange of a (temporary) slightly better user experience.

To the Apple lover crowd: please feel free to downvote, and check my past comments to downvotes them also if you didn't already. I'm used to it now, I don't care about my karma. Anyway, I'll loose some more re-upvoting all those perfectly acceptable comments I find grayed in some threads, apparently because they are not respectful enough to the King.

Oh, and I like Apple, I learnt computing on an Apple ][, I applauded to the very smart Unix move for MacOS, many of my colleagues and friend own a MPB or A, but none would be enough of a zealots to try to hide out comments expressing concerns about walled gardens.

No, we're like adults used to being able to do what we want with our own hardware. Being able to do what you want with hardware is the historical computing norm (gaming consoles being the exception). Android-based devices carry on this tradition so I use them, rather than paying Apple $99/year for the privilege of putting applications I've written on my own hardware.

The "correct" place to put user data on iOS 5+ is any place that syncs with iCloud. That's the crux on this issue: iOS 5 is Apple's assertion that App Store users are their customers, not the app developer's customers, and they want to handle the backup and security around their customers data.

At a basic level, it's because her mental model of How Things Work broke. She thinks that it's reasonable that using the Amazon Kindle application on any platform she ought to be able to buy books from Amazon as part of that app. After all, she's signed in, Amazon knows who she is, at most they ought to ask for a password confirmation to let her spend her money.

And that doesn't work.

So she was unhappy with Amazon. Reasonable. She was so unhappy, she posted on Facebook about it, where a dozen of her friends pointed out that Apple wanted a 30% cut of content sold on their device.

Their device. Not her device. She paid for it, but now she sees that it isn't hers.

She thought that an iPod was like a computer: you use it, you select software to put on it, you use the software.

Her mental model breaks AGAIN, because she thought she owned the iPod. Now she finds out that it's actually an Apple-owned store that doesn't like competition.

Apple got their benefit when they sold her a device. They got more benefit when they sell her software to go on the device. Why should they get more benefit for interfering in a transaction between her and Amazon?

She knows what rent-seeking means, and she doesn't appreciate it.

As a web developer on SEO forums, I hear of these cases all the time, but when you analyze these sites, usually 1 of 3 things is happening:

- Web developer(s) made a mistake, causing a (search engine) accessibility problem.

- The site is in violation of the Google webmaster guidelines.

- The site lacks (unique) content, or otherwise doesn't contribute at all to a healthy search engine index.

I never read of a case of Google arbitrarily or capriciously excluding sites from their index, offering them no way to appeal. In general, I also think the advice Google gives is far from inconsistent.

This could be a popular position for a web developer who got a site de-indexed, but maybe apply Occam's razor first. A mistake? A trend? An algo change? Worthless content? Blackhat SEO? Bad architecture? Got hacked?

Or do you want to jump immediately to Google arbitrarily removing well-intentioned sites from their index? I guess then you can blame bad luck of the draw.

Example: "Your website has been removed from our indexes because it displays too many X's.", when no other search engine has thought of filtering websites based on X.

And because the decision is probably based on many, many parameters and weighted, it would have to tell you the values (and descriptions!) of each one of them, making the message even more sensitive.

When was the last time you hacked something together for yourself on an iOS device?

Are there any alternative channels that don't require jailbreaking?

and obviously, there are other, extremely simple and effective ways to reach a website: typing in the address bar, links by email, facebook, twitter, etc., etc.

the app store is the one and only gateway to the iOS platform.