September 22nd, 2008 : Duplicate Functionality
“Your application duplicates the functionality of the built in Iphone application…”
You know what? Apple has a really good point here. If you already have one means of doing something, why would you need another one?
I mean, Safari comes with my Mac OSX, so why would anyone want to use Firefox? Or Camino? Or Opera? That would just be silly.
Mail.app can check all my email, which means there isn’t a reason in the world for anyone to make, let alone use a different app for this.
TextEdit comes free with my computer, and there really isn’t any difference between it and Pages, or for that matter, Microsoft Office, so there isn’t much point in keeping those development teams around much longer.
It’s really ironic that a company whose most famous motto was ‘Think Different’ has decided that eveyone who uses their product will use it in the same way for the same thing.
I’ve noticed a bit of a trend where Apple seems to say, “We’ll make this super-easy for you to do! (That is, of course, as long as you do it exactly the way we tell you to!)”
Nice for beginners, but sometimes experienced folks like us want to… well, ‘Think Different’!
If you use an app that duplicates their app’s functionality, then suddenly all the other Apple applications that were relying on the other one being your sole choice won’t be able to get the cross-information they crave and won’t work so seamlessly.
This is why I don’t like Apple stuff, they seem to want to take control of your computer and tell you exactly what you’re going to use on it. I’m sure it makes everything lovely and white and shiny and “just working”, but I think I can handle a little choice here and there.