Tags: apple, appstore, iphone, spam

<rant>

I've owned an iPhone from day one, I've jailbroke it and also purchased one of the first video apps in the jailbreak repo. Of course for my money I got no update and it finally faded into oblivion, but whatever...

At first, in the jailbreak world, we had a lot of nice free stuff coming out, until the greed set in... The jailbreak store sells you shit now so if you buy a bunch of apps there and Apple locks out the jailbreakers, good luck getting your money back.

After the App Store got settled and Apple added the copy/paste and video the only reason I had to jailbreak was for theming and some cool widgets that let me see what was happening from my lock screen. I miss this, but I got tired of jailbreaking just for that. So I started getting stuff from Apple's store.

Life in the beginning was great! There was a lot of good free stuff to offset the commercial stuff, but this slowly changed. The free stuff became demos and the truly free stuff has become less and less. No big deal, most things are .99 cents. Well, that is slowly becoming a thing of the past also, as I have noticed prices slowly rising.

If you remember when the AppStore started everything was .99 or free. Before Apple allowed developers to sell from inside their applications I purchased an app called Photo FX, which cost me $2.99. I go into Photo FX recently selecting a filter I wanted to use and it tells me I have to buy it, WTF! If I would have known that it was going to become a container to sell me more shit I wouldn't have bought it! It pissed me off...

I also purchased another application, What's On, that went “free” I guess because it wasn't selling. Of course they decided to include f'ing advertisements so they could make money off this free app! Damn it, I paid for this with no ads and I shouldn't be troubled because your product didn't sell as well as you hoped! I could have just used i.TV!

The Apple store is a free for all of greed and I am not really liking it. I love the NY Times application, which was free. It has an ad at the top and I don't mind, but all the sudden it started placing a full screen ad up that I have to click to exit!

Now the real issue here is that many of these applications are falling within the realm of false advertisement! I don't know about you, but if I buy a black car, which was advertised as black, I don't want the paint to shift it's color to red in a month simply because Honda decided black no longer sells well! Wouldn't you take it back! That leads us to the next issue, you can't give it back! You can't get your money back once you purchased an application.

So there isn't any real consumer protection and Apple dictates what goes into the store, even if it's something their customers want. Crazy...

I'm waiting for the “pay to use” system where you pay to use the content in the application and borrow a shell to contain the content you pay for. If you remember old cell phone apps, this is basically what I'm talking about. My wife bought Pacman on her Sprint phone for $3 that expired after three months – EXPIRED!

GPS Drive is charging monthly, or yearly, for the voice commands in their turn by turn app! WTF! I pay $2.99 to find out that I will have to pay yearly for the only feature I bought it for! I have their other application called GPS, which is the same damned thing as GPS drive without the option of adding the voice! It was an impulse buy for sure, I saw $2.99 for turn by turn and bought it. I should have just read their site first and bought the one I wanted, which is MobileNavigator. It's $90.00, but the voice is always there! I could have bought Sygic Mobile Maps for the US for $39.00 if I wanted cheaper... (GPS Drive is not falsely advertising and isn't really that bad of a deal, but I'm ranting damn it and it came out...)

Imagine buying a desktop computer from Dell and Dell forces you to use Insight for your internet for a minimum of two years under contract, they lock you out of the hardware and limit your access to the file system. You can only purchase software from Dell and this software will not run on any other desktop computer. The software you buy for this system slowly morphs into a mini storefront or spam container. The majority of these applications are nothing more than interfaces to web services that can be accessed from a web browser for free. Last, but not least, your Dell installs software on other systems, without your permission, so your other systems can interface with your Dell. Would you buy it?

Too bad the iPhone is the best smart phone available and Android will likely follow a similar path.

Apple,

Give me control of the hardware I paid for and own. I don't want to hack the fucking baseband, I just want access to the hard drive!

Give me software with no hidden costs. Instead of denying apps, make the devs play fair.

Don't allow developers to change software that was purchased without disclosure.

Let me pick my carrier.

Allow everyone in the AppStore, including competing products, services, and companies.

Give me standard USB access to my phone so I am not forced into using only your software.

</rant>

Tags: apple, appstore, iphone
Current Mood: bitchy
Current Music: Obscenity Trial - Lecture (No Club Mix)

1. Native Copy/Paste functionality with clipboard application for management.

2. Flash support! I assume you're keeping it off for strategic reasons, but why bother unless you're planning on getting into the web multimedia delivery and creation tool business.

3. An FM Radio receiver and tuner software. Mixed with streaming internet radio and podcasts this negates most arguments for satellite radio.

4. Streaming audio/video from Apple TV or iTunes library, including over Edge, like Orb does.

5. Better content management - like contacts, bookmarks, calendar, and app settings. You are really limited in what you can do with these things. Would be nice to have an app on the iPhone that helped in managing these items rather than flipping a switch in iTunes that syncs everything to specific software on your computer. I personally do not like having a third party web service for syncing my personal and private data between my phone and computer. I certainly like it less that they charge me to sync my personal and private data between my devices!

6. Better camera, higher mega pixels to keep inline with other Smartphone mfgs.

7. A video recorder with upload, like to YouTube, ability.

8. External storage, like a micro flash slot, so applications like Mobile Finder can make use of them for moving data around between devices. As of now I always need a network to move data from the phone to my computer. Don't worry, people will always by bigger hard drives regardless of external storage Apple...

9. Talking turn by turn directions for your GPS and voice command recognition.

10. The ability to run iPhone applications on the OS X desktop through iTunes. I already predicted this will happen at some point, along with a release of OS X for standard hardware.

These 10 little things would make the jailbreak less important and would make your device very hard to beat in the market place!

Tags: apple, iphone, mac, os x