iPhone News Updated

There’s not an app for that: How Google Voice could hurt iPhone

When the story came out that Apple had rejected delayed approval of the Google Voice application, the initial reaction from the media was outrage. Many iPhone users were also angry. While the controversy may damage Apple’s image in the public eye, the real damage could likely have occurr elsewhere — in the developer community.

When Apple put Google Voice in purgatory, it expanded its arbitrary ban on competition from core functionality out into speculative functionality. And that’s a huge step in the wrong direction if Steve Jobs wants to continue to entice the best developers to keep writing snazzy applications for iPhones.

Here’s my logic. Writing software for iPhones is time consuming and hard. Apple’s choice of the Objective C language for iPhone has made it much more difficult for programmers to build iPhone applications than if Apple had gone with a more standard language such as Java or a more popular version of the C coding languages. So that’s the first problem.
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Apple Lifts the Curtain on App Store Approvals

On Friday, Apple, along with AT&T and Google, filed responses to the Federal Communications Commission’s inquiry into Apple’s rejection of an iPhone application developed by Google.

Apple’s letter said that “contrary to published reports, Apple has not rejected the Google Voice application, and continues to study it.” Google’s telephony application, along with several third-party applications that made use of Google Voice, were rejected or not included in the App Store because they interfere with the iPhone’s “core mobile telephone functionality” — specifically, the visual voicemail feature of the device that allows iPhone owners to select which messages they want to listen to or delete.

The company also said the Google Voice application disrupted the iPhone’s text-messaging feature and address book. “These factors present several new issues and questions to us that we are still pondering at this time,” the company said in a release.
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