Agreed. Mixture WTF ? As my parting shot this is from the Guardian Newspaper.
Digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s new app will only be available for Android smartphones, in protest at the terms of Apple’s developer agreement for app makers.
The
EFF Alerts app will deliver news on its campaigns, and encourage people to “take action” accordingly, for example by sharing details on social networks or emailing politicians about specific policies.
“Sadly, though, we had to leave out Apple devices and the folks who use them. Why? Because we could not agree to the outrageous terms in Apple’s Developer Agreement and Apple’s DRM requirements,”
wrote EFF intellectual property director Corynne McSherry.
“As we have been saying for years now, the Developer Agreement is bad for developers and users alike,” she continued, in a blog post outlining a few of the terms that the EFF disagrees with.
They include Apple’s bar on developers making public statements about the terms; its ban on reverse engineering or helping others reverse engineer iOS or its software development kit; its requirement that apps developed using that SDK be distributed through the App Store only; and clauses stressing that
Apple must approve any bug fixes or security releases, and can remotely disable apps at any time.
McSherry added that the final straw for the EFF was the requirement to include digital rights management (DRM) in its
iPhone app.
“Lots of developers hold their nose and sign the agreement despite these onerous conditions, and that’s understandable. The Apple App store is a huge market and hard to ignore if you want your business to succeed.
And sometimes, developers have to weigh these onerous restrictions against not just their ability to survive financially, but also their ability to reach and protect users from snooping and censorship.”
McSherry is right about the “lots” – Apple had more than 9m registered developers for its Mac and
iOS platforms by June 2014, according to figures shared by chief executive Tim Cook during his keynote at the company’s WWDC show.
By September, there were 1.3m apps available on iOS’ App Store. Apple has also regularly published details of its payouts to iOS developers:
more than $20bn by July 2014, with iOS users spending more than $10bn on apps and in-app purchases in 2013 alone.
However, as Apple enters 2015, it is facing more public criticism of its policies, not just from the EFF, but from some iOS developers too.
Influential developer Marco Arment made headlines earlier this month with
a blog post pointing to “the rapid decline of Apple’s software”, although he
later criticised journalists for taking his harsher words out of context from the piece.Meanwhile, developers
Cromulent Labs and
Panic both went public in December over approval issues with features in their iOS apps, sparking wider discussion about how Apple enforces its App Store policies.This debate will continue in 2015, with the EFF keen to widen it to pinpoint the individual clauses that it thinks are infringing developers’ digital rights.