Much has been written about why Apple (AAPL) issued software update 1.1.1, which wreaked havoc with untold numbers of iPhones, but not much about how they did it.
It’s not an easy riddle to untangle. The update seems to have affected different iPhones in different ways. Although there are plenty of stories about unlocked phones being “bricked” by the update, there are anecdotal reports of unlocked phones that worked just fine under 1.1.1 — albeit only with AT&T’s (T) service, not T-Mobile’s or any other carrier’s. Some phones modified by third-party software were also broken by the update; others lost their unapproved applications but were otherwise unaffected. Even some virgin, unmodified phones were rendered inoperable, for reasons that remain mysterious.
As Erica Sadun of The Unofficial Apple Weblog (tuaw.com) puts it: “the transition from working iPhone to brick seems to be a completely random process.”
At first, the loudest cries came from users who had unlocked their phones to work with other carriers and found that the devices had been rendered inoperable — a loud but relatively small minority.
But Apple’s deeper problem is that the update also disabled all native (i.e. unauthorized) third-party applications — a development that will ultimately affect every iPhone user. Third-party applications are the secret sauce that have made every computer — from the Apple II on — infinitely more powerful than its designers imagined. Who besides a programmer on Apple’s payroll is going to write software for the iPhone now?
The move was especially surprising because an Apple executive — VP of hardware product marketing Greg Joswiak — only a few weeks earlier had signaled in an interview with PC Magazine editors that the company wasn’t hostile toward native iPhone apps. The money quote from the magazine’s GearLog blog:
Rather, Apple takes a neutral stance - they’re not going to stop anyone
from writing apps, and they’re not going to maliciously design software
updates to break the native apps, but they’re not going to care if
their software updates accidentally break the native apps either. He
very carefully left the door open to a further change in this policy,
too, saying that Apple is always re-examining its perspective on these
sorts of things. (link)
Not surprisingly, many developers saw that as a green light to start their business plans. One company, Mexens Technologies, maker of the popular Navizon software that triangulates your position and displays it on your cellphone, is now offering $25 refunds to anyone who bought the version it had just started selling for the iPhone.
Mexens execs might well wonder why Apple went out of its way to warn unlockers that last week’s firmware update might wreck havoc with their hacks but didn’t offer the same courtesy to the purveyors — or users — of third-party apps. It’s also a mystery why, as the New York Timesreported, Apple is treating some iPhone owners with third-party app problems with the same contemptuous no-help-from-us policy they are using for users who tried to break the iPhone’s lock-in with AT&T (T).
Apple spokeswoman Jennifer Bowcock certainly won no friends for Apple when she told the Times‘ Katie Hafner:
“If the damage was due to use of an unauthorized software application, voiding their warranty, they should purchase a new iPhone.” (link)
Little wonder that Nokia is going after Apple with its “phones should be open to anything” advertising campaign, or that Gizmodo changed its iPhone recommendation from “wait” to “don’t buy,” or that there is a movement afoot to punish Apple with a class-action lawsuit.
Below the fold, the devastating YouTube video, available here, that uses Apple’s own “Think Different” soundtrack to memorialize the end — perhaps permanent — of the era of native third-party iPhone apps. As usual, Danny Lyons has the last word on that subject here, in The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs.
Until yesterday, Apple (AAPL) had kept mum about attempts by various
third-party programmers to free the iPhone from the binds that tie it
to a particular carrier — AT&T (T) in the U.S. and now O2 in the
U.K. and T-Mobile in Germany. As recently as last week Apple responded to questions about the release of iUnlock with a terse “no comment.”
But when asked a direct question at the “Mum is no longer the word”
press conference in London yesterday, Steve Jobs couldn’t remain silent
– especially in front of Matthew Key, CEO of O2 UK, which by all
accounts has paid a pretty penny to be the iPhone’s sole provider in
Britain. Jobs responded to the question “Is unlocking a concern?” as
follows:
“It’s a constant cat and mouse game — we have the same thing with the
iPod with music.” Steve looks at Matthew, “Are we the cat or mouse? We have to stay one step ahead of them.” (quote from Engadget’s live blog)
The analogy to music is a curious one, given that Jobs has argued
forcefully against DRM (digital rights management) schemes that make it
hard to copy digital music files — despite the fact that Apple uses them in iTunes. This may explain his professed
confusion about whether Apple is the cat or the mouse in this new game.
Should unlocked
iPhones proliferate much beyond the hacker community,
Apple would be less at risk than the cellphone carriers. Apple
gets paid for its hardware in any event, whereas user fees are the
carrier’s main source of iPhone revenue.
Apple has not yet deployed its most powerful tool for combating unlock programs:
firmware updates for the iPhone so far have disrupted some third-party apps, but haven’t touched the unlock solutions. That will almost
certainly change, and when it does the cat-and-mouse game Jobs
describes will begin in earnest.
Meanwhile, as Gregg Keizer points out today in Computerworld,
Apple and O2 have found other means of encouraging British customers to
stick with authorized iPhone dealers and carriers. The flat-rate plans
(with unlimited data transfers) that O2 announced yesterday are a
pretty sweet deal in the Europe smartphone market, where pay-as-you-go
is the norm. An even better sweetener may be the free account British iPhone customers will get with The Cloud, which has blanketed London’s financial district with Wi-Fi and
boasts some 7,500 hot spots in Great Britain and Ireland.
Given that only 30% of the U.K. is covered by O2’s EDGE network, iPhone
access to those hotspots could turn out to be key.
[Photo courtesy of Shaun Curry/AFP/Getty Images via the New York Times]
The ties that bind the Apple (AAPL) iPhone to AT&T (T) are being broken in droves today following the release of iUnlock, the first open-source procedure that frees the device to work on other wireless networks.
"If you’re like us, you’re furiously unlocking every iPhone in sight," writes Paul Miller at Engadget.The code, which was developed by an anonymous group that calls itself the iPhone Dev Team, is available in zip files at Gizmodohere.
For iPhone owners in the U.S., this means that their phones will work with SIM cards from T-Mobile, which uses the same GSM protocol. It has even greater significance overseas, where GSM is standard. With iUnlock, the iPhone can be used in much of Europe and the Far East.
The release of the procedure comes 74 days after the iPhone went on sale and one day after the first commercial unlock solution became available. It was only Monday that iPhoneSimFree finally started shipping their $99 product to iPhone resellers.
As it happens, it was the release of iPhoneSimFree that gave the open-source team the clues they needed to come up with what they claim is a similar but independently developed procedure. You can read here Paul Miller’s account of how programmers with names like Zappaz, Hexxat and GeoHot, working through the night and communicating on IRC channels, raced to crack the code.
The iUnlock procedure is not for the faint of heart. Documentation is scant and there a real risk that a misstep will "brick" your iPhone. Moreover, it’s known that several nice iPhone features, including visual voicemail and Apple’s version of YouTube, don’t work on unlocked phones.
Apple today had no comment on the news. Earlier this week, hardware marketing chief Greg Joswiak told editors from PC Magazine that the company was taking a "neutral stance" toward third-party iPhone applications, although he might feel differently about this hack.
AT&T’s legal department is more likely to take a hard line, since this threatens their main source of iPhone revenue. But the legal situation here is murky. The exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
that allows individuals to unlock their own phones may not protect companies that sell the same service to
others. But iUnlock is free. And if AT&T’s lawyers did try to take someone to court, they might have a hard time getting their hands on Zappaz, Hexxat and GeoHot.
Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster, whose 50-hour survey of Apple (AAPL) stores produced the most definitive estimate of iPhone sales to date, has combined his data with yesterday’s report that Apple sold its 1 millionth iPhone on Sunday to calculate the effect of last week’s 33% price cut.
By Munster’s reckoning, Apple and AT&T (T) were selling an average of 9,000 iPhones a day before the price reduction, which would have put their quarterly sales at 594,000 as of Sept. 5. The two companies had already sold 270,000 phones in the previous quarter. To reach 1 million by Sept. 9, they would have had to sell 136,000 more phones, or 27,000 a day — a 300200% increase.
The new rate, Munster writes in a report to clients issued yesterday, “clearly represents an initial surge that is not sustainable.” He estimates that sales will stabilize at a 50% increase.
By the end of the quarter, he believes, Apple will have sold a total 1.28 million iPhones.
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Much has been written about why Apple (AAPL) issued software update 1.1.1, which wreaked havoc with untold numbers of iPhones, but not much about how they did it.
