Suddenly apple hates wifi
Because removing porn from the App Store wasn’t enough, now Apple’s taking aim at software that helps iPhone, iPod touch and, soon, iPad users find Wi-Fi hotspots. Forgive me for cynically choosing to disbelieve the company’s excuse that all of these apps use undocumented or private APIs and consequently must be removed for the sake of the platform’s future. If Apple actually had a workable, believable strategy for approval, it wouldn’t have approved any of these apps in the first place. The apps are or, rather, were distributed under the trade names Sekai Camera, Wifi-Where, and yFy, among others; and they made it easier for owners of such devices to find Wi-Fi networks and thus avoid using their more costly and often congested 3G connections.
In the bad old days of wardriving, we simply walked or drove along a public thoroughfare and constantly refreshed our network lists to identify convenient and often free hotspots. The process was manual and tedious, and these packages automated the process of discovery just in time for Wi-Fi to become table stakes on handheld devices. With more end users than ever before seeking safe havens to avoid busting their carrier-imposed 3G data caps, Wi-Fi finders, scanners, and stumblers had finally hit the big time.
Herding the subscriber sheepIt doesn’t take a rocket scientist to conclude that Apple and its carrier-partners weren’t particularly pleased with this trend. I’m going to assume the wizards at AT&T didn’t much appreciate the potential long-term thinning of subscriber revenue, and quietly encouraged Apple to squash it before it became rampant.
I’m singling out AT&T because it’s such an easy target of consumer discontent, but this may as well apply to any other carrier in any other country.
They’re all cheering Apple’s move because it tilts device traffic back onto their own wireless networks. Never mind that developers have been begging Apple to open up the API so that they don’t have to get in through the back door. Never mind that tech-savvy consumers now have another reason to jailbreak their devices.
Never mind that this is yet another example of near-Draconian (or maybe full-on Draconian) control over a platform that, despite its extreme popularity, remains a prime example of the risks of leaving too much control in the hands of one provider. What’s to stop Apple from summarily choosing another category next week, or next month, or whenever, as a candidate for pruning?
What’s to stop Apple from deciding that developers, whose only option up to then was to creatively work around deliberately baked-in limitations in the SDK to bring consumer-friendly offerings to market, have gone too far and need to be taught a lesson? To be blunt, no one can stop Apple from doing whatever it wants. I’ve said before that this is Apple’s playground, which means it can make the rules, interpret them as it sees fit, and change them on a whim.