Apple's encouraging semi-openness

I find really encouraging the big iPhone App Store news this week, i.e. Apple’s decision to allow the rival Spotify music service. I think it marks a crucial turning point in the degree of proprietary control that Apple will exert over the iPhone/iPod/iTunes ecosystem.

Apple has been playing an odd game for 30 years. Its quandary over proprietary control vs. the need for third party complements sends mixed messages to third party suppliers. Sometimes it wants 3rd parties, sometimes it begrudgingly allows them to compete, and sometimes it tries to stomp out third party competition for its end-to-end control of a complete system. (IBM in the 1970s, DEC in the 1980s and Microsoft in the 1990s were even more hostile to certain third party competition).

Of course, I have a very biased perspective, since I spent 17 years making money by allowing third party printers to connect to Apple’s Mac OS computers. For the first decade, our clients competed with Apple’s hardware (until they discontinued their printers in 1998). At times, Apple worked against its interests as a platform owner to hinder competition and protect its printer product line.

Maybe Apple’s latest App Store move is under the gun of an FCC threat (including an empty threat of litigation). Still, I find it encouraging.

Both as a product strategy, and as a nod to government competition policy, this points to a much better Apple strategy, defined in two parts:

1. Make a great end-to-end solution; but
2. Allow point replacement at any point within the modular design.

This sort of modularity and consumer choice is consistent with many technologies of the past decades. My first stereo was a Kenwood receiver, Advent speakers and a Teac tape recorder. Later on I used a Harmon-Kardon tape recorder with the Sansui amplifier — and did not have to use a Sansui tape recorder or a HK amp. Although I own some Yamaha speakers, in general the makers of the best speakers didn’t make electronics.

Of course, such open modularity is the DNA of the Internet: What would a Mac be if it only allowed use of Mac.com email, or a Windows machine if it only supported hotmail and MSN? Shouldn’t Android phones allow use of SaaS sites not owned by the Monster of Mountain View? Or if Outlook could only send email to other Outlook clients?

Apple’s point products are pretty darn good, so it shouldn’t be afraid of competing with its ISVs and IHVs. If it is afraid — and uses technical means to block third party competition — it’s no better than 1990s Microsoft, back in the Bill Gates days when it was crushing 1-2-3, WordPerfect, and DR-DOS.†

I don’t think Apple is done opening up, and I have no illusions that it’s going to end up as open as Mozilla or Eclipse. Still, it’s a great start.

† Charles Ferguson makes a convincing argument that Netscape was at least partly culpable for its own fate.

Carrier app stores still alive and growing

The assumption was that the iPhone App Store harkened a tidal shift to phone (or operating system) centric app stores. Many assumed that this also rendered obsolete attempts by mobile network operators to create their own walled gardens.

Apparently two of the four major European operators, Orange and Vodafone, didn’t get the message. The Orange Application Shop (announced last month) and the unnamed Vodafone application store (announced Tuesday) are two examples. (Apparently the Vodafone store will also apply to Verizon Wireless in the US.) Both T-Mobile and Telefonica also have app store experiments.

Each of the app stores has its own APIs, own billing systems, own markets. Of course, this is in addition to the app stores from Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nokia, RIM, Samsung and others — each with its own APIs, devices, billing and so on.

The proliferation of app stores reminds me a lot of music stores: Apple created the iTunes Music Store and everyone wanted to have their own store. Now many of them are gone.

However, there’s actually a better argument for multiple music stores than multiple app stores. Once upon a time, we had thousands of LP (later CD) stores. If the online music stores were all distributing DRM-free MP3 files, then consumers could buy songs from different stores and different days and have them all work together.

However, a fragmentation of MP3 distribution would increase buyer power and thus increase competition (and price competition) between suppliers. This competition could commoditize MP3 distribution — putting the less efficient dealers out of business — or put pressure on music publishers to increase promotions or cut prices.

Symbian joins tool commoditization

As David Wood mentioned in his blog last Friday (during his visit to the US), the S60 development environment Carbide from Nokia is now available free. (It’s also mentioned by bloggers Lucian Tomuta and Simon Judge). Of course, Carbide is based on the open source Eclipse IDE.

Of course, having a free (as in beer) IDE is the bare minimum nowadays for getting ISV interest in a smartphone platform. Today you can get a free download of the IDE for the gPhone, the iPhone SDK or various BlackBerry JDEs. Microsoft apparently still sells Visual Studio and its various Windows Mobile add-ons.

What remains as an issue is the host platform. Symbian, Windows Mobile and BlackBerry require Windoze PC while Apple (natch) requires Mac OS X. Google and its Android work with either (or Linux).

While gcc from the FSF/Project GNU has been available for decades, it has been the combination of Eclipse and the Internet that really combined to commoditize development tools over the past decade: if programmers expect free tools or nothing, it doesn’t get much more commodity than that. It seems as though the real passing point came in February 2005, when Borland joined the Eclipse Foundation. After that, there was no turning back.

Symbian's new ecosystem

Today Symbian officially announced its new ecosystem program, the Symbian Partner Network. The new program is available now and the old one goes away next month. Existing partners were briefed under NDA last April but the announcement was delayed until June (and then July) to allow time for the transition.

David Wood (author of DW2-0) was quoted this morning as explaining the new program to IDG. The main differences are that the program cost $1,500/year instead of $5,000, and that the service is increasingly automated (to improve scalability and reduce costs).

Obviously things have changed with the Nokia buyout, and it's not clear what role the program will play before or after the transition to Symbian Foundation (which will have its own similar or different program).

Still, the program may live longer than the predicted 6-9 months. Due to third party licensed code, Sun required much longer than anticipate to release OpenSolaris as open source, and among the 30 million lines of Symbian OS code similar problems are certainly lurking. So even with a Symbian Foundation, the disclosure of OS code may be covered under NDA for a little while longer.

There is also the question of whether Nokia really is in any hurry to release the code. Both Google’s open vaporware alliance and LiMo are today walled gardens rather than open source projects. And I don't know how much pressure there is for openness: LiMo has just swallowed its main European competition, LiPS, which agreed last month to be folded into LiMo.

Nokia also has thus far not understood open source software, at least at the level where decisions are made. There definitely are people at Symbian who do understand, and others in a position of influence who are trying to get it.

If/when Symbian eventually does go fully open source, it will be a very different world than today for the Symbian partner network. The current network is managed through contractual restrictions on access to source code — which are more generous than most proprietary software, but obviously less flexible than an open code repository like Apache or Eclipse.

Also, combining S60 with Symbian OS under one roof (and killing the other UIs) will bring together the entire Symbian stack, to compete directly with the integrated Windows and Linux stacks. Thus the platform (and the partner relationships) will look more like any other OS platform strategy (except of course for the open source part).

Opening up the iPhone to (useful) apps

One of the earliest gripes on the iPhone was that it would fail because it’s closed to third party ISVs who want to write native software applications. In research papers presented at conferences earlier this year, Mike Mace and I questioned this was the relevant metric: after all, CD players, DVD players and iPods have sold for years without postload software, so if the iPhone is an entertainment device, then the relevant complement would be content not software.

However, the iPhone is getting software too. Since the iPhone day, there have been a few developments (so to speak) on developing software for the iPhone:

• Apple has posted official information on iPhone development, which in its view is mainly about using Safari on a Mac or Windows machine to prototype web apps that run on the iPhone.
• The other approved solution is porting Dashboard widgets originally developed for OS X — most of them freeware. Since widgets are just HTML, porting should be relatively easy, and lots of beta widgets have been released. While Apple talked about this at WWDC in June, there’s nothing yet on the developer website.
• Apple is also not providing a hardware developer note like they have been providing for other computers over the past 20+ years. Is that because the product design is secret, or because they want developers to focus on the publicly supported web-based APIs?
• As Doug Klein let me know, the weekend after the iPhone release there was an iPhoneDevCamp in SF hosted by Adobe. Since I don’t own an iPhone — and since SF is all of 100km away — I decided not to go, but it sounds like that was a mistake.
• A hacker at iPhone Dev Wiki has built a “Hello, World” program for the iPhone. (NB: If you failed “C” programming, this is the canonical one-line program for any development system).

There have been some interesting experiments. Does the iPhone have extra storage? iPhoneDrive allows you to use it as a heavy, overpriced USB memory stick. Not enough storage? Brian Landau of Box.net is plugging his freemium remote storage solution, now available for the iPhone.

Apple thus gets a decidedly mixed score for openness to ISVs, but the jury is still out. Will the iPhone eventually be open to native 3rd party apps? And, in the end, will platform-specific apps really matter to adoption?

The one form of app that iPhone users don’t want is malware — viruses, worms or other security exploits. This week some security experts got free press by reporting how they exploited the iPhone’s vulnerabilities. That they were seeking publicity is pretty clear, given the line at the bottom of the web page describing the exploit: “You can contact us at media [at] securityevaluators.com. We can also be reached by phone at 443-270-2296.” They also set an Aug. 2 deadline for Apple to fix the problem before they will release all the details on how to duplicate the exploit.

On the one hand, the iPhone vulnerability could be an inherent problem due to the power of such a mobile device. Vnunet.com quoted the president of encryption firm PGP as saying

“There are so many security issues with the iPhone, because it is not just a phone,” he said. “From an IT guy’s perspective it is a Linux computer with communications built in.”

On the other hand, the report notes that the iPhone runs all Java apps in the single, privileged administrator mode. As a column in Electronic Design pointed out, there's a known fix for this: have multiple protection levels (like two).

This is not rocket science: when I was writing VAX/VMS code back in 1980, us peon ISVs knew there were privileged (system-mode) apps because we couldn’t write them (or, perhaps more accurately, couldn’t install them). Apple’s had people working on security issues for decades, so one has to assume this was a get-it-out-the-door issue. As with any security issue, Apple (like other vendors) will be expected to issue a free field upgrade to solve this problem: it will be interesting to see what the OS update mechanism is for the iPhone.

Also, the iPhone isn’t going to get the free pass on security that OS 9 and X did. Nobody wrote viruses for the Mac because the small market share meant they probably wouldn’t propagate, and almost nobody would care. The iPhone will probably have enough market share among U.S. smartphones (and more than enough visibility) to attract a large supplier of crackers.

The aforementioned “information security” experts included one snarky (but telling) comment on the iPhone’s security priorities:

Q: Does this add credence to Apple's position that 3rd party applications are not allowed on the iPhone for security reasons?

A: We don't think so. Almost all of the security engineering effort on the iPhone seems to have been spent protecting the revenue model, rather than protecting the user (which is, of course, an entirely understandable position). For example, a constrained environment is used to prevent users from loading new ringtones onto the phone, but the applications are not run in a constrained environment to contain damage caused by hackers who exploit them.

If Apple is closing out rival providers of user benefit — but not malicious exploits — that would not only be real proof of a closed platform, but also a sober reality check for Apple’s supposed emphasis on the user experience.

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