If you ever tried to develop software on phones before the iPhone, you'd understand. A buddy and I developed a pretty cool 'Cocktail App' for the Danger Hiptop.
After many months of frustratingly going back and forth, we were not able to get it onto the Hiptop app store because the carrier (T-Mobile) did not want to be responsible for someone using a recipe to make a simple bar drink and then going off and killing someone. They eventually added a 21+ category and we still couldn't get it onto the store. Never mind the fact that someone could just use the installed web browser to view the same exact content.
Of course you'd think that we should have known that we might get rejected... but the issue was that Danger couldn't even talk to the carrier until the app was written and they could physically show it to them. So it was one of those things where we knew the app might get rejected, but we took the risk anyway. It was a good learning experience.
So yes, this weird stuff around getting software onto phones has been going on for a long time. Apple was one of the first to take the control away from the telco. I don't know if that is better or worse, but it changed the economics substantially.
> So yes, this weird stuff around getting software onto phones has been going on for a long time. Apple was one of the first to take the control away from the telco. I don't know if that is better or worse, but it changed the economics substantially.
The legal burden is no longer on the telco's but on Apple in this case.
Correct. At the time, there was no way to even talk to the telco. All communication had to go through a single person at Danger who was overloaded with their job and barely had time to respond to people who were not guaranteed to make it into the store. Luckily I had friends that worked at Danger and could help a little.
It took a while and went through a lot of growing pains, but at least now, Apple has the financial resources to hire staff to respond to support tickets. If we are comparing literal apples to lemons... I'd much rather deal with someone at Apple than someone at a telco.
After many months of frustratingly going back and forth, we were not able to get it onto the Hiptop app store because the carrier (T-Mobile) did not want to be responsible for someone using a recipe to make a simple bar drink and then going off and killing someone. They eventually added a 21+ category and we still couldn't get it onto the store. Never mind the fact that someone could just use the installed web browser to view the same exact content.
Of course you'd think that we should have known that we might get rejected... but the issue was that Danger couldn't even talk to the carrier until the app was written and they could physically show it to them. So it was one of those things where we knew the app might get rejected, but we took the risk anyway. It was a good learning experience.
So yes, this weird stuff around getting software onto phones has been going on for a long time. Apple was one of the first to take the control away from the telco. I don't know if that is better or worse, but it changed the economics substantially.