Apple & Google Voice
Everyone’s in an uproar about Apple’s rejecting the Google Voice app. My thoughts on that are pretty much “duh”. That’s Apple. That’s how they’ve always run their show. Always. If you make something on their very closed, very proprietary platform, it better be something they don’t feel competes with them in any way or they’re going to reject it. End of story.
They rejected an app that does nothing more than automatically download podcasts to your iPhone because they felt it competes with iTunes. How something that makes your iPhone, and only your iPhone, better could possibly compete with the iPhone I have no idea. But that’s Apple. They want you hitting up iTunes, and therefore being within a reasonable proximity of the iTunes store where you might pay them, as much as possible so they ban anything that might interfere with that.
Don’t get me wrong, that’s their right. I’m not one of those far-left idealists who has moral qualms with somebody trying to make a buck, so while I totally expect this sort of behavior from Apple, it doesn’t make angry at them. It does make me just a little more glad I got a Palm Pre instead. It does make me glad I’ve consistently chosen products (from mp3 players to cell phones) that optimize user experience over ones that want to lock me in and make money. It does make me laugh every time I hear one of their higher-ups talk about how they just want to make good products and don’t worry about making money, because just about everything they’ve done in the last decade has belied that. And it also does make me question the wisdom of blocking an app that makes your product better in the hopes that it will lead to someone spending an extra buck or two on songs.
But it doesn’t piss me off and it wouldn’t even if I owned an iPhone because I’m not dumb enough to expect anything else. It’s just Apple doing what Apple has always done. If you bought an iPhone you should have seen this sort of thing coming. To Steve Jobs, every customer is just a means to an end. People who love Apple products try their best to forget that and imagine Steve’s arms around them keeping them warm while they’re standing in line for the 3GS at 6 a.m., and then they get angry every time Cupertino does something like this and forces them to snap back to reality.
The reality is, of course, that Apple is in it for the money. Always has been too. They haven’t always been good at it, but they’ve always tried to make products that make money. If they make products that are “better” they only do so because it will make them more money than making ones that are not “better”. If you think they’re some sort of Prometheus bringing style down from Mount Olympus to mankind just to save us from our tasteless dictators in Redmond, you’re deluding yourself and you deserve the disappointment that inevitably follows time and time again.
Some people are blaming the whole fiasco on AT&T too, but that makes no sense to me. There’s a Google Voice app that runs on Blackberries, which AT&T hosts. And besides, what does AT&T have to lose? It doesn’t reduce in the slightest the number of AT&T minutes or text messages you use (and therefore buy). They’re most certainly going to pull the plug on anything that interferes with you paying them, but Google Voice doesn’t do that. In fact it might result in you paying them more.
But it does interfere with the iPhone, in the same way that the Podcaster app did. It’s got you replacing one iPhone function with a third party version that’s better. And unlike the Podcaster app, they couldn’t just toss that feature in at a later date and steamroll Google for having found itself on the wrong street in their product road map. So if you didn’t see this coming, you just haven’t been paying attention.
