Get it now on iTunes

The first Coal Minds iPad app is on sale, and it’s Future Kings #1, our full-length comic book debut on tablet devices. Check it out, a 22-page debut issue for just $.99.

Future Kings #1 - iPad app/comic book

Well, who in the world would have thought, upon waking up last Thursday (9/9/2010), that it would be time to make a new blog post in this series? With an apparent back-track on their previous ban on apps developed with third-party software, Apple has release new TOS allowing those apps to be submitted and sold through the App Store.

Any and all communication with Apple regarding the delay in approving my latest Flash-based iphone app (mi-toons) was brief and professional which describes the usual exchange with them. Unfortunately, months of work and time were still rendered useless by their lack of information.

After submitting mi-toons (An iPhone app that allows users to make their own political cartoons and save them to their phone) to the App Store back on March 15th there was no specific explanation of why it was stuck in “review” although it became clear when they released TOS forbidding third-party development. That limbo was precisely where it sat for 6 months with no word, until suddenly about 2 hours after the “policy change” announcement last Thursday. That’s when I got an email from the folks at itunes connect letting me know that the status had changed to “Ready for Sale.”

I plan to distribute my comics for the iPad as well as developing some other unique apps for it, so this is a big help to me. But in the end there are still tons of questions. Is this the only way this could have been handled? What exactly was done over the last 6 months, and what caused this sudden change of heart? Was it pressure from Android’s increased market share? Was it fear of the government’s wrath for anti-trust practices?

At this point it’s clear that it doesn’t matter. Android is going to do very little to monitor or restrict sales of apps for its devices. The revenue will probably be lower because of that. Apple is going to do everything it can to keep strict control and they make no apologies for it – the revenue to developers will probably be much higher because of that until google can find a happy middle ground. What we MUST have is competition so developers can make a choice between the two.

Read the other parts of this series and experience my headache:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Establishing The Motive:
Last time I wrote about the first part of the dispute, which culminated with Apple creating new TOS (effective in a few days). These new terms will most likely result in the removal of my 2 existing itunes apps, and a third which has been “in delayed review” for 4 weeks now without explanation. These three apps and a fourth being finalized at the time of the announcement were all written in Flash.

A woman tries to jailbreak her iPhone

The next logical step is to look at the actual on-device performance of my apps to see whether or not Apple’s claims of third party apps producing inherently inferior design are justified.

First of all the claims that Flash is not acceptably fluid on mobile devices simply aren’t true. After repeated tests on everything from Samsung BlackJack II (using Flash Lite) to iPhone and Android’s Nexus One, a glaring reality is that the iPhone simply doesn’t perform as well with Flash as other pieces of hardware. Saying that this means the Flash program is poorly written is like saying that Firefox is a poorly written application just because of how horribly it runs on Macs (imo). iPhone folks will not want to hear it, but the Droid devices are simply far better in terms of performance.

Despite this disparity, Apple’s sales dictate focusing on their market, and getting improved performance was simply a matter of tweaking a few things for the platform. This was the same as any other kind of coding – there’s a learning curve because Flash has never run on these devices.

So how does my sommelier app, built entirely in Flash, run on the iPod Touch and iPhone? Very well. Well enough that my marketing person and I decided not to tell our testers who were downloading it via provisional codes that it was built in Flash. If there was any issue we wanted to hear about it naturally. Their only noticeable difference? They wondered why the file size for the download was a little higher than what they were used to. No complaints about animation quality, image quality, speed or functionality. This, despite the fact that my sommelier app accesses a series of arguments that allow for over 10,000 possible food pairings. We all know that iPhone users are picky about app operation, and changes were always made to optimize performance.

It’s not as if locked technology is a new thing for Apple. Their entire business model is based on locked hardware. When I wanted to start building and upgrading my own computers I stopped using Macs 7 years ago. Here however, the actions of Apple seem to be vindictive, as indicated by the announcement’s potential financial effect on Adobe:

Adobe went so far as to say in today’s Q-10 filing with the SEC that being banned from the iPhone and/or iPad could significantly hurt its business.
“To the extent new releases of operating systems or other third-party products, platforms or devices, such as the Apple iPhone or iPad, make it more difficult for our products to perform, and our customers are persuaded to use alternative technologies, our business could be harmed,” Adobe said in its filing.

Link

Is it supposed to be a coincidence that the TOS were announced 4 days before Adobe’s CS5 announcement? A coincidence that they wouldn’t even allow Adobe a chance to work with them on optimizing the software packager for the device?

Most troubling, in a storefront infested with $.99 garbage apps – which most users discard after downloading – there’s no frame of reference for Apple’s supposed quality control. Similar to their removal of “sexually suggestive” apps, Apple continues to display nothing short of the sort of tyrannical behavior their fanboys have been excusing for years. This is what happens when a single entity acts as judge, jury, and in my case, executioner for creative products. Aren’t many of the same people making excuses for them the ones that went ballistic over Microsoft’s DRM moves of the past several years?

Next, Pt. 3: “Selling all of my Apple Products and Moving on” or …

Alright You Cunts