Mint Usability

Some months ago I was questioning if Apple was becoming evil (Is Apple becoming evil?), and at least with some parts, it seems to me it’s steadily steaming towards that direction. In the end I quoted a somewhat famous movie:

“You either die as a hero or live long enough to see yourself to become the villain“

In case you’ve been living in a barrel (on under a rock, respectively) the last few weeks, here’s a brief collection of what’s going on at the moment

Chapter One: App refund policy

If you remember the road, that Apple has been going down with OS X, where they kept taking features from most popular OS X utilities and integrating them into their OS (good example would be dashboard widgets), making the original app obsolete. So, against this road taken, it’s not hard to imagine a situation where Apple is taking some popular apps and integrating their functionality to their iPhone OS. However, the behavior itself is quite everyday business in software world but the situation changes when you look at Apples contribution back to the community. Practically zero. Then you look how insanely aggressively the silver apple has been defending any of it’s IP against anyone, the situation gets bad to worse. Practically this would mean that they just keep taking IP from small developers, not giving anything back to the community and, in worst case scenario, going after the same small developer. Though, this is just nitpicking, and rather just a minor sidetrack.

Couple of days ago, this all took a step towards the dark side: Apple is expecting the developers to pay full refunds in the case any app is removed from the App Store (as Gizmodo reports). This would mean that even if magically you would end up saving all the money that you got from your app sales, you would still end up owing money. How? Remember how Apple takes 30% off from the transactions? That would be the part you’d end up owing since they are expecting you to cough up the full refund, while Apple is keeping it’s part of the sales. Sound like a bad deal yet?

So, imagine yourself as an iPhone developer who got new app out there and it’s making money. Some months later Apple comes up with iPhone OS update which has the exact same functionality, which in Apples books would be a reason enough (not like they need one, see next chapter) to remove your app from the store. Boomf! Within less than a second you went from having a successful career in iPhone development, to a guy who clearly doesn’t have enough money if the refunds start rolling in.

Continue reading “Apple taking steps towards the dark side, hatred, anger”