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Any e-bookers locked out of their iPhones after trying tweaks?
September 29, 2007 | 9:36 am
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By David Rothman
Know of anyone locked out of an iPhone after tweaking it to run e-book-related software? Don’t you love Apple—so responsive to user needs? People are balking. Such stunts are about as beloved as DRM. Apple should rely on style and features, not anti-consumer gimmicks, to keep up cashflow. I wonder if Apple might share marketing strategists with mobile.washingtonpost.com.
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Comments:
I unlocked my phone and installed a bunch of third-party apps. But I did it in the full knowledge that future updates might break them. Thus, I took the simple precaution of holding off on the latest update. Given all of the warnings both from the hacker community and the very fair warnings from Apple itself, that seemed prudent. I can’t understand why anyone with a hacked phone would move forward with the update except as an eyes-open experiment to see what would happen.
I don’t hold Apple responsible for their update breaking other people’s hacks. As a developer, I certainly wouldn’t want to have to support every kind of hack that goes on out there. There’s an official route for iPhone development (web-based apps) and there will undoubtedly someday be an official programming interface available. But for now, everyone should know (since Apple has told them) that any workarounds and hacks might break.
John Gruber made a convincing argument about why a true, open programming environment isn’t available, yet — in short, it takes time to solidify and document the programming interface, the user experience itself is still in flux as Apple tweaks it based on real-world usage (i.e., you can’t set the programming interfaces in stone if you’re still messing around quite a bit with the underlying code), and it gives time to get the user and coding communities aligned about what the user experience should be.
It remains to be seen if some of these actions begin to generalize into some broader pattern of attempted lock-in. For now, I attribute much of it to a combination of these technical/interface issues along with a good-faith effort by Apple to adhere to their agreements with the carriers. For better or worse, Apple won a landmark agreement to maintain full control of the hardware and software (versus the typical pattern of the carriers forcing user-hostile changes to the phones’ software), along with a share of subscriber revenues, in exchange for exclusivity. As such, they’re obligated to at least make an effort to maintain that exclusivity in the short term. Otherwise, they would be unable to win the same necessary concessions from carriers elsewhere in the world. Can you imagine what the iPhone would have been like if AT&T or the other carriers had been given license to mess with its feature set and interface?
As the author of the main book-reading software for the iPhone, I’m more than a little teed off. But I’ll say this: I’m not upgrading, and I’m still working on the software.