Beyond the app store

It’s rather late for me to jump in on the app store discussions but I think there might be a simple way to get to the core of people’s objections to the new rules: Apple is now telling developers what to do outside of the app store. It’s hard to argue that Apple can decide what that goes on in the app store - it’s their store, their platform and their devices. What’s more difficult for people to swallow is that to be part of the app store you now have to let Apple tell you how to run your business and set your pricing outside of their platform. I think that’s what really stinks.

Who actually asked for a “magazine-like” interface?

From Engadget’s coverage of today’s announcement of The Daily:

The team behind the new-age zine showed off plenty of that technology, including a magazine-like reading interface, letting you flip through pages or access a “carousel,” that gives you a higher-level view of the pages for easy, virtual flipping.

I know it’s not always wise to slag off on products you haven’t used yet, but to me all I’ve seen from The Daily (and most iPad magazines for that matter) translates to:

“We’ve added everything shiny and unnecessary we could to obscure the fact that we’ve just shoddily migrated our old content, interactions and business models to a new distribution platform”

Call me old fashioned, but I find the recently announced Readability service far more ground-breaking (and appealing) than another iPad Flash app magazine that can also take my money repeatedly.

Tablet OS

It’s not just that Apple is different among computer makers. It’s that Apple is the only one that even can be different, because it’s the only one that has its own OS. Part of the industry-wide herd mentality is an assumption that no one else can make a computer OS — that anyone can make a computer but only Microsoft can make an OS.

John Gruber made the point in 2009 that it’s hard to compete with Apple when you don’t control a major chunk of your product - the OS.

Back then Android didn’t have the support it does now, and WebOS wasn’t backed by HP. More importantly the iPad hadn’t launched yet. It’s various competitors hadn’t been announced yet either… 

Honeycomb looks impressive, HP is talking big and iOS is going form strength to strength. The biggest thing tablets have going for them in the next couple of years isn’t multi-touch or an app-store, it’s a level of competition in the OS and application space that has long been missing from the desktop market. 

We’ve also gotten much better at resolving interoperability problems than we were when desktop OSes were in their infancy - regardless of the OS you choose there are a raft of web apps and services that will work on all of them.

I, for one, am looking forward to seeing where this goes.

The Daily Joke

Contrary to numerous previous claims of The Daily being priced at 99 cents per week, Ad Age claims that the publication will cost 99 cents per day after a two-week trial period, with fresh news content being pushed to subscribers throughout the day.

Sounds a lot like the internet, but you know, smaller, more expensive and less useful. If this is true, I look forward to criticising this from the sidelines. I guess it can’t be hard to top old media’s previous iPad efforts…

(Source: macrumors.com)