User Abuse: iPhone lacks IM capabilities; Apple and AT&T choose quick cash over human factors

Yesterday, I stopped by the Apple Store in the Stonestown mall in southwest San Francisco, near the West Portal house we recently rented. The mission: check out the iPhone!

Michelle and I have alternated interest in the iPhone since its announcement back in January. However, when Apple made it clear that there would be no third-party software on the device, I was more than a little annoyed. This robbed the machine of any serious capabilities as a hiptop, in my opinion primarily to protect iTunes' ownership of the iPhone's full-screen interface.

As mentioned in my previous post, I suspect that their reasoning is as follows: If iTunes owns the right to play music on the device in full-screen mode, it can't as easily be turned into a personalized, on-demand jukebox -- and unless/until they enable Flash, it can't be done at all. This means that Apple cannot be edged out music, that critical piece of the experience. As much as I love Apple in general, I see it as a grave wrong that they have robbed users of choice of software. (Personally, I had planned on making a Flex/Apollo mp3 jukebox to access and stream music from my archive at home via the internet -- a sort of non-corporate version of Orb -- and releasing it for free.)

Then, with the recent devastating leak that the iPhone would lack a native instant messaging (IM) client, the last straw broke my interest in the device. My analysis became not that of a prospective buyer, but that of an outspoken critic. Even without third-party software, iChat would have given the iPhone the potential to start a massive leap forward in person-to-person communication, like the iPod did for digital music. Like the iPod, it wouldn't have been the first device of its kind -- there were tons of MP3 players before Apple entered the market, and today plenty of smartphones have IM capabilities; I personally have been connected to IM nearly uninterrupted for about 2 years. But also like the iPod, it would have been the first device of its kind that was targeted at the masses. If they had iChat, iPhone users would form a massive, constantly-connected chunk of mobile communicators. In the words of Tenacious D, it would make nonstop rocking possible.

But sadly, it is not so. There is no native instant messaging capability on the iPhone at all. A quick glance at the AT&T iPhone pricing plans explains why:


The important thing to note on this chart is that, despite all plans having Unlimited Data, there is still a very low limit (200/month) on SMS text messages. For an extra $10/month, you can bump that up to 1500, and for $20 the cap is removed altogether. Through the internet and unlimited data packages, SMS is quickly being made obsolete. They must have realized that iChat on the iPhone would have been the nail in the coffin for this aging, laggy technology. I'm sure the MBA quant jocks also realized that it would have been the end of the $10/month, $20/month, and overages that AT&T is set to reap from Apple's decision to restrict users to SMS.

In the world of product and service design, this type of behavior is viewed as typical money-grubbing, short-sighted user sabotage. These kinds of design decisions deliberately force users to spend more-than-necessary money for poorer-than-necessary experiences. It's not surprising news that a big corporation is doing evil things to exploit its userbase. What makes it worth blogging about is that, this time, a former white knight like Apple is doing AT&T's dirty work.

iPhone crashes and needs to be rebooted at demonstration

When I was checking out the iPhone at the southwestern San Francisco Apple Store on Sunday, the employee demonstrating the device had to shut it down and power it back on. As a hardened owner of the Palm Treo (aka "THE REBOOTERIZER"), I immediately noticed this and asked him, worriedly, "Hey, did you just have to reboot that thing?"

The employee told me that sometimes his phone (and apparently the display model as well) acts up in iPod or photos mode, and when it does so, he just reboots it. I deduced that this employee had only owned his iPhone for a maximum of three days. This means that, in three days, he had adjusted to a lifestyle of rebooting his hiptop device whenever it "acts up". We have an intransitive verb for this kind of behavior: "crash".

This reboot scare cancels the #1 reason I had been considering replacing my Treo 650 with the iPhone.

User Abuse: Apple's confines third-party iPhone applications to the web

Today Steve Jobs of Apple announced that the iPhone will not allow third-party developers to create offline apps for the iPhone, or really any iPhone apps at all. According to Apple, the iPhone's built in version of the web browser Safari will be able to run normal web applications, but OS-level applications are off limits to third parties. This is a disappointing move from Apple that really constitutes an announcement of the iPhone being closed to third party development.

From Bloomberg:

Jobs, 52, at first said he wouldn't allow any access for developers and then hinted May 30 that he had changed his mind, saying at a conference he would "find a way" to let them add programs while keeping the iPhone secure.

What a crock. He didn't "find a way" to let them add programs. He merely realized that, if the iPhone wants to claim that you can use the "real" web, as they did in a recent television commercial, standard web apps have to be feasible on the device. Here's the commercial:



So in a PR dance, Jobs claimed that this was a move that was actively made for the sake of developers, when really it was passively the only option. That, or neuter the web like some similar devices.

The real reason Apple did this: money.

I think this limitation of third-part developers is necessary if Apple intends to keep control of the device's music-playing functionality and the dollars associated with it.

I (and likely many others) planned to write a Flex media player that would stream music from my webserver or home computer, removing many file redundancies from my life and making iTunes' DRM (digital rights management) irrelevant by also allowing a user to load files directly onto the iPhone's memory in mp3 format. If Apple wants iTunes and their DRM and continue to gain power over the music industry, they have to cut these kinds of applications off at the head.

While a web-only version of such an iTunes-killer is feasible, it will be stopped short by an inability to run offline via something like Apollo or Google Gears, and by the browser's restricted access to local files. This means that, when the Blue Line in Chicago or the streetcar in San Francisco goes underground or you lose signal in some other way, your music would no longer be accessible. This lack of offline functionality may guarantee Apple's control of the device for the near future. However, especially for users that never lose internet access, I can still think of several ways to undermine -- err -- extend the iPhone's feature set :)

Sources:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aJw25UvZ47DQ&refer=home
http://www.engadget.com/2007/06/11/apple-announces-third-party-software-details-for-iphone/
http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_6114686 which has a terribly inaccurate title, "Apple opens up iPhone for programmers"