TechDistortion

Google Removes Dodgy Apps Using Killswitch

Apple was called out after the then iPhone OS (now called iOS) v2.0 came out with the promise of Apps for everyone, when Jonathan Zdziarski uncovered the feature during the course of development.

Google came right out and said it from the offset (doubtless as a result of the Apple fiasco): Quote from the Android Market terms of service - “2.4: …Google may discover a Product on the Market that violates the Android Market Developer Distribution Agreement or other legal agreements, laws, regulations or policies. You agree that in such an instance Google retains the right to remotely remove those applications from your Device at its sole discretion…”

It wasn’t until today that Google made good on its policy and showed that it was prepared to use it when several popular apps were shown to have malicious code in them. It certainly seems like a justifiable move on Googles part, however of more interest to me is how they got there in the first place.

Apple have been widely criticised by developers for being too strict, too vague and too inconsistent in their App Store screening process. Whilst some of those criticisms are fair, it seems that there are currently no documented cases where iPhone Apps were removed by Apple from Users devices. Apps are rejected on a daily basis and one has to think one or more malicious developers have tried their luck by submitting malicious Apps to Apples App Store with seemingly no success.

Were this to occur with Apples App Store, even if one or two Apps made it through the screening and approval process, the vast majority would be caught. Google needs to have some sort of close scrutiny on Android Market Apps or this incident, which affected some 50 Applications and was downloaded by over 50,000 people, may be just the tip of the iceberg.

Android is going from strength to strength with the recent Honeycomb release for Tablet PCs, but incidents like this have the potential to sour the public and shake confidence in their Market which can not do the platform any favours in the long run.

Which Telco is Best for an iPhone?

The iPhone has quickly become an essential piece of technology in the hands of consumers. It can be used for practically anything — video, music, gaming, internet, navigation, email, posting on Facebook/Twitter/MySpace, checking the weather forecast and radar to planning your appointments and (with the latest model at least) recording and editing basic video.

Australia is a unique country for many reasons, and it has added to its list of distinctions the fact that all of our three major phone companies — Telstra, Optus and Vodafone —now carry the iPhone, with smaller but no less important carriers like 3 now also carrying it as standard.

It certainly is great to have a choice, but with that comes the more difficult decision - which Telco will give the best iPhone experience?

Forget pricing. Put aside for the moment the various plans on offer in terms of pricing, since the value of one against the other is going to depend very much on your own usage. Instead I’ll focus on network coverage and which networks best support the features of the iPhone — in short, which will give the best user experience?

Let’s start off by looking at a couple of the marquee features Apple has particularly focused on in hyping the iPhone.

Visual Voicemail. This is a feature that has been around since the very first iPhone but oddly it has only been adopted by one provider so far in Australia, and then only in late May 2009 — Vodafone. Currently no other Australian provider supports it. For those unaware of what Visual Voicemail (VVM) is, at the bottom right of the iPhone’s telephony app is the voicemail icon, which accesses the VVM system (if enabled by the carrier) and pressing this displays the name/number of the caller who left the message, the duration of the message and individual controls for playback. Hence VVM messages can be played back in any order, stopped and rewound at any time and deleted or saved as desired. This kind of voicemail management is very handy for people who receive and make a lot of voice calls on their phone.

So why don’t all the Australian telcos have it? The system was designed in conjunction with Apple’s primary partner in the USA, AT&T, and the hardware and software suited their backend systems. Unfortunately not all telcos use the same equipment, making adding VVM an expensive exercise to implement, for a relatively small number of users. The other, more cynical suggestion is that since some of the telcos derive revenue from the calls made to retrieve voicemail messages VVM eliminates this income, making it an unappealing feature to adopt.

Tethering. With the release of the 3GS and iPhone 3.0 firmware, Apple permitted tethering of the iPhone to laptops, essentially allowing the iPhone to act as a modem, connected to your laptop via USB or Bluetooth, so the laptop can connect to the internet using the iPhone’s data connection. As this has been a common feature on most phones for years its omission from the iPhone was something of a mystery. At time of writing all the major networks allow tethering of the iPhone — with final hold-out Telstra only just enabling this feature.

App integration. I’m not going to count the many and varied apps created by the various carriers for non-phone applications — such as Vodafone/3’s Cricket app, or Telstra’s Foxtel one — since the functionality on one network may be better or worse than on another and it would ultimately be dizzyingly complex to try and compare them all. Plus of course how useful will the cricket app be once cricket season ends? It is worth having a look for yourself though — search the App Store for each of the telcos and see what apps they have that may be useful to you.

As for core telephone functionality, managing your account and checking voice call and data usage are important features of any phone. “My 3” and “Planet 3” are web apps that allow the user to check their data/voice call usage and manage their account. Optus’s “MyZoo” is formatted for mobile web browsers — but not specifically for the iPhone. Optus has released “My Account” as a native application, but it is reportedly not very reliable — when and if it is fixed it will allow monitoring of your account status, billing and such. Vodafone currently has no web app nor native iPhone app for checking usage/account status. Telstra has “BigPond for iPhone” (only just released) which is a native application that mostly mirrors the BigPond home page and includes data usage and billing information. So which product gives the best end-user experience? There are a multitude of phone call/data usage checkers on the app store for differing amounts of money, but a free native application from your provider seems reasonable to expect.  Hence Optus gets a point for trying to have an app, Telstra gets one for the same reason and 3 gets one for its iPhone tailored web app. Vodafone, tragically, misses a point in this category.

Data coverage. In many respects data coverage is the same as voice coverage except for one thing — speed. Right now the iPhone supports three speeds: 3G (fastest), EDGE (sluggish but liveable), and GPRS (painfully slow). All operators support 3G and GPRS, but only Vodafone and Telstra support EDGE. Optus and Vodafone share most of their networks, but for the iPhone the problem is that Vodafone has a 900MHz 3G band and alas the iPhone does not use this band — hence users on an iPhone miss out on this bit of 3G and drop back to the Optus GPRS system in those areas instead. 3 has 3G coverage where it has voice coverage in the major cities around Australia, but everywhere else is roaming on Telstra and quite expensive for data.

Exactly how fast the 3G coverage you’ll get (or how slow) will vary enormously by area, even within major cities, and providing a definitive answer would be staggeringly complex and difficult. Thankfully our mates over at Byteside enjoy staggeringly difficult stuff and performed a pretty thorough test series. Check that out when you’re choosing.

On area coverage alone, though, Telstra wins with three points, Vodafone gets two with its EDGE support beating out Optus and 3 each with one point because once you leave their 3G zones, it’s back to GPRS and slow data.

Voice coverage. So critical given that the iPhone is primarily and ultimately a mobile phone — though some might argue otherwise. Least dropped calls and best signal strength affect this item, so it’s off to the coverage maps of Australia. 3 has focussed on the major cities in Australia: Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, Canberra, Wollongong and Brisbane. In all other areas it has a roaming agreement with Telstra. This means plenty of “hard hand-offs” between networks (leading to dropped calls) and higher roaming charges on voice when outside the coverage area. 3 gets a point for voice coverage. Vodafone and Optus share the networks to some extent and as such have essentially identical coverage — tied second with two points each. The winner by far for voice coverage is Telstra — perhaps it’s an unfair advantage given it has been in the market the longest and inherited a virtual monopoly position from privatisation but in the end it has continued to invest and to build its network — three points.

The final analysis. Telstra ends up in first place giving the best overall iPhone experience. The final decision also needs to factor in cost, but that is a far more complex analysis and the sheer number of plans and options boggles the mind. Despite Telstra winning the most points in this survey, though,  my pick would be second-placed Vodafone because of the greater adoption of iPhone-specific features (and, ultimately, more competitive plans).

The iPhone is an amazing mobile phone but when choosing a carrier, it’s not always about the cost. Dropped calls and phone features will change your perception of the device which on one carrier may be passable; on a better carrier it may just be amazing. Original edited by Matthew JC Powell.

OSX: Where to Now?

OS X is the most popular Unix-based operating system in the world today, and with good reason. It is a tried and tested code base that is stable, scalable and reliable. However, given Apple’s recent focus on its iPhone, iPad and other touchscreen-based devices, some have speculated that OS X is dead. I disagree.

When Apple launched the iPhone Operating System (recently redubbed iOS) it simply took the core of OS X and added a whole bunch of touch input APIs, whilst stripping out the mouse- and keyboard-related controls (to some extent) and swapped the Dock and Finder for Springboard (that’s the grid of app icons on your iOS device).

With iOS now past its third birthday and nary a mention of the next release of OS X (10.7) since Snow Leopard debuted over a year ago, many speculate that OS X is being put on hold or some have said it is dead in the water. Whilst I certainly don’t believe it’s dead, I do believe that the true integration of the touch-based input is what’s just around the corner in the next revision of OS X.

There can be little argument that touch-based input is the flavour of the month for Apple just now, with 120 million+ iOS devices in the field. The new iPad has shown that apps can be written for a bigger screen in a better way yet still support full touch and approach desktop usability/productivity.

So then what for the desktop? It seems that integrating touch is the next logical step but experiments in the past have proven difficult for users who are constantly lifting and lowering their hand/arm to touch the screen, which is too far away for regular touch input. Also the issue of how the software responds is key — simply taking desktop software and using the touch to simulate a mouse click has proven unsuccessful in years of attempts by Microsoft.

I see the solution in a two-fold paradigm shift: one for hardware and one for software.

First the hardware must be convertible between desktop mode and touch mode. This could include a lighter, thinner detachable screen, or perhaps an iMac that can tilt forward and down to rest at desk level for easy touch input. Other laptop manufacturers have already provided solutions such as twistable screens or reverse folding screens, but why not have a detachable screen with its own battery that communicates over WiFi/Bluetooth back to the powerhouse (the bit with the keyboard, CPU etc). Even better, why not sell a Mac Mini as the powerhouse and use your iPad as a UI for it? Decentralised processing is something Apple already does with xGrid.

Second, the software also needs to be switchable between touch and desktop (anything other than a touchscreen, including a mouse) input modes. In the past we have had Universal Binaries in OS X that support PPC and Intel CPUs. We also currently have Universal Apps that run on both iPad and iPhone/iPod touch iOS variants in the same binary. Why not introduce a third variant of a Universal App — one that uses either touch input (for iPad, iPod touch, iPhone or iMac in “Touch Mode”) or desktop input. In the ultimate seamless blend of the two operating systems Apple could transition between the Applications folder and the Dock into a home-screen style of Springboard icons as the iMac moves into touch input position. Microsoft Word could change from pull-down menus and the iconic “ribbon” toolbar into pop-over buttons and iOS-style navigation.

With a large number of developers working on both OS X and iOS applications it should be possible to merge the two code streams into common, truly universal applications that will work on any Apple device. If Apple goes down such a path OS X would indeed be gone — usurped by its own offspring as it were with all Apple hardware running iOS, and only minor changes based on the device it is installed on.

Whilst this is fun to imagine, putting all speculation aside Apple will need to do something in the next 6-12 months to indicate where it is heading with OS X or Windows 7 (which is winning Microsoft back some its lost mind-share) will begin to erode away what Apple has achieved with Leopard and Snow Leopard in recent years.

Microsoft has already tried to integrate touch into its operating systems with no real success. Can Apple step up and do it right? For Apple’s sake, I hope so. Original edited by Matthew JC Powell.

The App Store (it's all about the numbers)

In what is becoming an increasingly regular occurrence of late, Apple changed its mind regarding publishing a list of rules for applications to be submitted to the App Store. Some have seen it as bowing to developer and possibly even government pressure (the FCC investigation that started out of the Google Voice rejection mid 2009 may have contributed — but we can’t be sure). Either way, now a list of “rules” exist with some highly emotively-worded statements. More on that later.

Since its inception the App Store has been lauded by Apple, mostly for its numbers. With every keynote or public speaking opportunity Apple executives including Steve Jobs, Phil Schiller and Scott Forestall would make a point of mentioning the number of apps in the store as it rocketed ever higher and ever faster with no immediate end in sight.

Some pundits have speculated that the App Store has become the Crap Store where the number of apps that crash excessively or perform little useful function outnumber the well-designed and well-thought-out apps. Indeed this appears to be Apple’s own opinion now to some extent with this line barely halfway down the first page of the App Guidelines: “We have over 250,000 apps in the App Store. We don’t need any more Fart apps. If your app doesn’t do something useful or provide some form of lasting entertainment, it may not be accepted.”

On the surface that seems fair enough, but does such a position stifle competition? Surely in an open marketplace the best product would (or should) win in the end due to its features and quality? Let’s say there are 100 fart Apps but then only a few will be regularly downloaded and supposedly then only the best, surely?

We know that Apps that sell well in the first week or two of release tend to develop a critical mass of user reviews and downloads, which puts them into the Top 100 or even Top 10 lists in their category (Utilities, Games etc) or even overall. This visibility extends their popularity significantly leading to better overall sales. For new App developers wishing to enter the market it’s a big problem trying to get that momentum to stay in the charts and compete with other similar Apps. So if a certain class of App (like Fart apps, I suppose is as good an example as any) has some critical number of Apps for sale, will Apple just draw a line and say, “That’s it — no more fart apps”? It certainly looks like it’s intending to do just that.

So the argument begins — my fart app has a knobby/flicky button here that isn’t on that guys fart app which makes mine better. Acceptable or not? Before long this becomes impossible to police. If there are 100 fart apps (I stopped counting at 100 by the way when I searched the App Store — there are lots more) is any one reviewer at Apple going to be able to tell the subtle differences between each of them and a new submission? It’s unlikely. Does that mean there will be uncategorical rejections based on the App Class?

If so, it means no new developer will be able to submit a new app in an established class and, hence, the developers that were there first will be the only ones in the game.

Forget fart apps for a moment. There are plenty of other App classes such as clocks, calculators, planners that also have an abundance of Apps in them. If Apple does indeed start capping the numbers, then clearly the size of the App Store is no longer what it wants to achieve. Unfortunately, improving the quality of what’s in the App Store already is difficult without developer backlash — as the removal of “widget-like” Apps a few months ago proved.

So if you can’t clean out the garbage, you leave it in the Store and stop new ideas coming into established App classes? Seems to be a little counter-productive. Therefore, where is the incentive for a new App developer to enter into the App Store, if their app won’t be approved since there are already too many Apps like it?

The App Store risks becoming a group of existing Apps with few updates made by the same developers with little new blood and stale Apps in another year or so. So the App Store, which (until now at least) has always been about quantity, has suddenly become all about quality. It only took three years to go from no platform, to huge platform, to what may need a huge platform-wide App garbage collection.

Instead of focussing on what can and can’t be allowed into the Store, Apple should direct its energies into better search and categorisation techniques in the App Store and improve the customer experience to find the right App for them. If they don’t, the Store may become an even more polar opposite to an open marketplace, and its slide downwards might be as quick as its ascent. Original edited by Matthew JC Powell.