Can We Stop with the "Evil" Thing?

I always enjoy reading James Higgs' commentary on iPhone issues even though we often disagree on issues. That is true for today's piece entitled iPhone OS 4.0: Now With Added Evil. He makes some good points, many of which I disagree with, but, I have one big pet peeve with his post, which is…

…can we please stop with this trend of calling things we dislike or disagree with "evil"?

Evil is baby killing… pogroms… serial killers… the Jonah Brothers. You know, bad shit. Evil is not restricting the choice of languages you can use when you write software for a single software platform from a single vendor. My gosh, people. Talk about skewed, first-world perceptions! This is, at worst, "annoying", "frustrating", or maybe even "bothersome". It's certainly not "evil" in any reasonable sense of the word. It's not even immoral, unethical, illegal or fattening, no matter how much you may dislike it.

(Sorry, James - you're not the only one to do this, yours was just the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back)

I appreciate that people don't like the recent SDK agreement changes, and I even understand why. But let's keep some fucking perspective, can we? We all signed an agreement that said Apple could unilaterally change the terms of the agreement by giving us notice, and we were okay with that because we wanted to be part of the App Store. Now that Apple has actually gone and changed it a few times, people are whinging like the world is ending. The door's not locked, people. Feel free to leave if it gets too onerous for you. If you're not willing to man up the way Dan Grigsby did, then register your complaints using the bug reporter and move on with your life.

I don't always like the decisions Apple makes. I think the app store censorship is sucky, the review process is still too arbitrary, and 3.3.1 is worded more broadly than it should be. But none of those are bad enough to make me leave the platform. I like the platform, and there's still so much opportunity here that I definitely want to stay. So, I've lodged my complaints and have moved on.

I really don't want to get sucked into the argument about 3.3.1, but I need to point out that there is a valid reason why Apple would choose to do this. Even if you don't agree with their decision, you should at least acknowledge that it's not arbitrary (something I've seen as an implicit assumption in many of the rants and arguments against 3.3.1)

If you use Apple's provided tools and frameworks, when you submit your app, all the code that makes up your app is available. Apple controls part of it, and you control the other part. With an intermediate layer, there's a third chunk of code that's a black box. Apple can't get to it and you can't get to it, either. Have you noticed that we're also not allowed to build frameworks for the iPhone the way we can on the Mac. Same exact reasoning.

The changes Apple is having to make to the frameworks to accommodate the multitasking APIs in 4.0 offer a good example of why Apple feels they need to do this. I can't discuss technical details of 4.0, but I will say that by tweaking the frameworks and APIs, Apple has been able to maintain a surprisingly high level of backwards compatibility with older apps. Guess which apps aren't playing nicely with the new multitasking functionality?

Yes, it's about control, but no, it's not arbitrary or without reason. You are welcome to disagree with Apple's judgment, but don't assume the changes ares being done for arbitrary reasons: to spite Adobe or because Steve Jobs is in a bad mood.

Let's look at a hypothetical situation. Let's say that instead of the handful of Flash-generated apps that Adobe snuck onto the App Store, let's imagine that there are 5,000 of them. Let's also say that hypothetically, for some reason, Flash-generated apps don't work with 4.0, and Apple can't reasonably make them work with 4.0¹. When 4.0 is released and all of those apps break, who's going to end up looking bad?

If you responded with anything other than "Apple", you're delusional or, at least, don't understand customers. Customers don't know or care how their apps were made. They know that yesterday, their apps worked, today they don't and the only difference is that they updated to a new version of the OS. What's the logical assumption for somebody who doesn't know the underlying technical details to make? There's only one: That Apple's new OS sucks. Would it be an accurate assumption? No, but that's the perception people would be left with, and to Apple, customer perception is king.

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1- Yes, Apple could work with Adobe to get the Flash Packager changed, but a) Apple has some reason to anticipate that Adobe would drag their heels, since they've dragged their heels for ten years on moving Creative Suite to Cocoa, and b) they'd have to test a good portion of the 185,000 apps on the App Store to even know which third party library was at fault, which just isn't practicable.