Just a quick thought that I’ve been meaning to write about but never do: Apple’s iPhone didn’t start out a closed ecosystem; as I remember, Apple fought the good “open” fight against all the developer and press grumblings when they announced their Web Apps strategy with the initial iPhone release. <\/p>\n
All they heard was whining and how you couldn’t do anything modern with Web-based Apps. Too slow. No offline access. Not enough system-level controls\/hooks. <\/p>\n
So, they hunkered down, doubled back, and made the premiere “closed” App ecosystem. Sold like hotcakes. Got mobile curmudgeons to start thinking about mobile-dominant futures. Got 10-year-olds excited about programming. Made individual developers’ works available to the world with only a $99 budget. <\/p>\n
And they’re now hated for not being “open.”<\/p>\n
I’m not going to defend Apple, or get into whether Android is better because of it’s open nature. (I will say it looks like a rosy future for Android, though.) Me? I love Apple hardware and software (and their somewhat-open ecosystem), but am deeply troubled by their mobile ecosystem’s closed marketplace (in other words, not the store itself, but simply that I can’t side load software onto devices I own outright without Apple blessing it first). <\/p>\n
So troubled that I’d get rid of my iPhone and iPad? Absolutely not. So zealous that I won’t consider Android? Nope, already have one, and will be an excited early adopter of Google TV. <\/p>\n
The “open” argument will win against iPhone only as soon as Android marketshare and dollars start hurting Apple. I doubt Steve Jobs will spend much time listening to his critics a second time until then. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Just a quick thought that I’ve been meaning to write about but never do: Apple’s iPhone didn’t start out a closed ecosystem; as I remember, Apple fought the good “open” fight against all the developer and press grumblings when they announced their Web Apps strategy with the initial iPhone release. All they heard was whining […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[422,69,209,459,310],"class_list":["post-492","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-android","tag-apple","tag-apps","tag-closed","tag-open"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.laaker.com\/micah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/492","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.laaker.com\/micah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.laaker.com\/micah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.laaker.com\/micah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.laaker.com\/micah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=492"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.laaker.com\/micah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/492\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.laaker.com\/micah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.laaker.com\/micah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.laaker.com\/micah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}