This is why I won’t buy an iPhone

What’s wrong with the iPhone?

If you’re reading this post, you might be wondering what the hell is wrong with the iPhone for anyone to refuse to buy one. Actually, you may already know, but chances are you’re one of those happy iPhone or iPod Touch user.

First of all, there’s nothing wrong with the iPhone itself. The iPhone is a great product that works better than any other smart-phone currently on the market. Yes, it’s even better than the famed Nexus One. It also has tons of apps to back it up which make the iPhone experience very complete.

What’s wrong with it is the company behind it and their practices. I’ll explain in this article why I think Apple doesn’t deserve anyone’s money and why I chose to stop buying any products from them. I’m an ex-Mac fan who almost bought an iPhone.

Patents promote monopoly practices

This is an article that was featured recently on Engadget about that talked about all of the patents Apple is going after in a lawsuit against HTC. More specifically, this targets the Android, but if we were to actually apply most of these patents, Apple would have total monopoly over the smart-phone market and the PC market because no one else would be allowed to sell similar products.

Some patents, like the object oriented operating system, are just so broad that it’s ridiculous it’s still patented. Essentially, it would mean Microsoft and the Linux community would be infringing on Apple’s patent.

This goes even further in stupidity with things like the Automated Response To And Sensing Of User Activity In Portable Devices. This patent is what enables the iPhone to shut off its screen and controls when you bring it to your ear in a call. Some manufacturers like RIM, creators of the BlackBerry, avoided the patent with solutions like the click-screen of the Storm, essentially preventing your ear from screwing with the controls unless you were to really push against the phone and click on the screen with your head. RIM’s solution actually works very well, although the actual click screen mechanism itself isn’t so great, but HTC didn’t think about that and implemented the same face-recognition technology as the iPhone on the Nexus One, Google’s Android handset.

You can see how far these things go into the realm of simply patenting technology we take for granted. It’s as if someone was being sued for making an RPG game because Square Enix had already did it with Final Fantasy. It just doesn’t make sense. You can’t patent a genre. And in the same way you can’t patent technological features beyond a certain point or what you get is pure monopoly.

I encourage you to read the Engadget article just to see how dumb Apple is being with all their patents. When companies have great ideas, they should just defend them by making the best out of them. I don’t even understand why Apple is suing HTC. The iPhone clearly doesn’t need patents to differentiate itself from the competition.

Freeloaders are not welcome

If you never were part of the open source community as a developer, this is something that’s perhaps a bit hard to understand. Essentially, it goes along the lines that when you create open source software, you expect the community, or anyone who uses your software, to give back in one form or another.

For example, take the Webkit browser engine. It’s open source, so everyone contributes to it, but when companies like Google use it for commercial products, they also freely give back new code to the community and help in developing Webkit. This is how it always should be.

Real open source projects are community efforts and companies who use them should always give back. If they don’t, then they break the collaboration process and become a nuisance to the community, because they just suck off everything it produces for its own personal profit.

This is exactly what Apple is doing and they have been doing so at numerous instances. One of the best example is Mac OS X. Apple took in code from FreeBSD and still does, but never gave back and made its operating system proprietary, keeping secret everything they did on top of the open source community’s hard work. No-one in the BSD world got any benefit from Apple’s effort, but Apple got every benefit from their efforts.

It’s also the case of Webkit, where Apple took in the KHTML project from KDE and just scrambled off with their own engine, that, while being open source, doesn’t make their web browser or the one on the iPhone any less proprietary. Had it been a real open source efforts, Safari would probably be a distribution of the Konqueror web browser featured in KDE and the KHTML project wouldn’t be so technologically late and backwater as it is today.

Neutrality is crucial to our future

Neutrality is probably the number one reason I refuse to every develop anything for the iPhone platform. Why? Because Apple decides whether your app goes to market or not and there’s nothing you can do about it because the App Store (a.k.a. iTunes) is the only sales channel for the iPhone. This wouldn’t be problematic had Apple only blocked dangerous or copyright infringing apps. However, Apple did way more than that, and lots of businesses saw their efforts in vain because Apple decided to cut them off from the App Store because their app duplicated the functionality of one of Apple’s.

Because of this, and lots of unknown reasons too, apps such as Google Voice, multiple video streaming apps, and web browsers not based on Webkit, are blocked from the App Store.

So, for a smart-phone, this might not be so dramatic at first glance, but let’s look at it this way. The iPhone is now a true platform by itself and is as important as Windows and Mac OS X are. If Windows would have been like the iPhone OS, Firefox would have never existed because Microsoft could have simply blocked it from its “store”.

See where this is problematic? Non-neutrality impedes on innovation and the freedom of choice. Apple is not neutral and locks in its users to whatever they decide on.

And so…

This is why I decided to boycott Apple. It’s one thing being proprietary, it’s another just being evil.