David Steinberger:
After hearing from Apple this morning, we can say that our interpretation of its policies was mistaken. You’ll be glad to know that Saga #12 will be available on our App Store app soon.
In a shocking move, Google has recently deleted AdBlock Plus from the Android Play Store. This is hugely disappointing because it demonstrates that Google is willing to censor software and abandon its support for open platforms as soon as there’s an ad-related business reason for doing so.
Until now, the Internet and software development communities have relied on Google to be safely on their side when it comes to building open platforms, encouraging innovation, and giving users maximum choice about how their computers will function. But with today’s news, that commitment to openness suddenly looks much, much weaker.
Google clearly has a vested interest in preventing people from installing ad blocking software like AdBlock Plus.1 But until recently, the company did an admirable job of leaving that matter aside and letting users make their own choices about whether they wanted to hide ads on their phones and in their browsers. Google established a reputation for building tools that put the interests of their users first. This new form of censorship is the exact opposite. It is not only a betrayal of the principle of openness, but a betrayal of the trust that people put in Google when they decide to buy an Android phone.
For developers on the Android and other Google teams who are reading this, we urge you to rethink this terrible decision. Stand up for users. Don’t let Android take the dark path. Don’t be evil.
— Google Takes the Dark Path, Censors AdBlock Plus on Android | Electronic Frontier Foundation (via wilwheaton)(via wilwheaton)
The new features that many Android users are missing out on are just part of the problem—the more pressing issue is security. Flaws in the built-in Android browser, apps, and the Android operating system itself are going completely unpatched for months or years, which stands in sharp contrast with the more rapid security patches that Microsoft publishes for Windows (just to pick a prominent example).
Nat Brown, one of the founding members of the Xbox team within Microsoft, absolutely eviscerates the current direction of the product:
My gripe is that, as usual, Microsoft has jumped its own shark and is out stomping through the weeds planning and talking about far-flung future strategies in interactive television and original programming partnerships with big dying media companies when their core product, their home town is on fire, their soldiers, their developers, are tired and deserting, and their supply-lines are broken.
And:
Microsoft is living in a naive dream-world. I have heard people still there arguing that the transition of the brand from hardcore gamers to casual users and tv-uses was an intentional and crafted success. It was not. It was an accident of circumstance that Microsoft is neither leveraging nor in control of.
And:
Apple, if it chooses to do so, will simply kill Playstation, Wii-U and xBox by introducing an open 30%-cut app/game ecosystem for Apple-TV. I already make a lot of money on iOS – I will be the first to write apps for Apple-TV when I can, and I know I’ll make money.
Read the whole thing. My sense is that Brown is dead-on. Microsoft “won” that last round of the console wars, but that may actually hurt and not help them. Because what they think most users will want is actually just an illusion — a reflection of the past.
The next Xbox sounds like a great power gamer machine, but what if the real competition is not the Playstation or the Wii-U, but the as-yet-untapped Apple TV running iOS games?
I was an Xbox fan for a long time — I owned three different models until I finally got fed up with all the quirks of the software (some of which Brown addresses in his post) and threw the thing out the window. The new Xbox should have been released at least two years ago. Microsoft rested on their laurels for too long. Now they have to hope Apple doesn’t release an SDK for the Apple TV before they unveil the new Xbox.
