It is similar, but with the added item of requiring the items to be sold through Apple.
There was a very similar thing with Nintendo in the 1980s.
As anyone who played video games at the time might remember, all Nintendo “licensed” games for the NES had prominently displayed “Nintendo Seal of Quality” on the cartridge. I believe that seal still exists or existed until at least the mid 2000s, but is much less prominent on new products.
Interestingly part of the reason the seal of quality existed was Atari, and the legal test of the seal also involves Atari. Anyone who was playing video games in the early 1980s probably had an Atari 2600 and various closely related successor machines (not necessarily including full fledged PCs Atari also released.)
People fondly remember Donkey Kong, Pitfall, and other such classic games for the Atari. What is often forgotten in the haze of nostalgia is the Atari days were the true wild west. Small little game shops would pump out a hundred games a year, every single one of them a ripoff of a popular game. Sometimes they would barely change anything at all. Sometimes they would create a Pitfall clone for example and release it as some generically titled Adventure game. Then six months later they would release the exact same game with a different title and label. Enough dopes would buy enough of the garbage games that these borderline fraudulent game shops could kick around for a long time. You could literally buy Atari games out of the back of some guy’s car that probably are unknown even in the age of the internet where nerds have lovingly tried to catalog and record every video game ever made. Some knock-offs were produced in such limited runs it’d be impossible to list them all.
This was bad for gamers. On top of all that some people started making erotic Atari games, which weren’t really erotic at all given the graphical capabilities of the time–but they still caused great moral offense to that era’s religious fundamentalist soccer moms.
It was Nintendo’s belief that this rampant wild west style of game publishing was at the root of what destroyed Atari in the console market. So Nintendo basically required all games that could run on its hardware to be approved by Nintendo. There were additionally strict licensing requirements and agreements that these companies had to agree to for Nintendo to license their games. One example is game companies were only allowed to publish a certain number of titles per year, this was to cut down on companies creating endless knock offs or “new” games that were slight variations of previous games they had already created. Some companies got around this by creating spinoff companies.
The Nintendo Seal of Approval was the physical “proof” that a game had been officially licensed by Nintendo. This was not just a paper regulation, but a physical one. The 10NES chip was installed on NES consoles and if a game was not licensed by Nintendo then it would not be able to properly interface with the chip.
Just like Apple’s “walled garden” there was a very real barrier to entities wishing to publish titles that were not approved by Nintendo. Just like Apple’s walled garden, people found ways to circumvent it. The simplest method was the creation of special cartridges that would spike the chip with voltage on system start up, rendering it temporarily inactive. (It’s kind of silly to think how many games were actually made to essentially shock the console to allow it to play the title…something I was totally unaware of at the time.) As an aside by the way, there were actually some fairly quality titles that were not Nintendo approved, so this wasn’t quite the Atari 2600 situation where it was just a bunch of garbage titles. (Of course some were truly awful.)
Tengen (Atari) didn’t like the voltage method because they feared that it might damage the console and that they would be exposed to liability suits if one of their games destroyed a system. Atari however was not happy with the terms of the Nintendo license, and felt as a major and established player in the video game world it should be allowed to produce far more than the allotment Nintendo’s base license gave a game publisher. Atari also didn’t want to create multiple subsidiary companies to get around the onerous licensing agreement, as other major publishers did. Not wanting to use the voltage override and not wanting to create spinoff companies Atari thus had to come up with another way to circumvent the system. Nintendo’s 10NES system was actually patented. Atari got all the information on the system from the patent office, and said they needed it to defend themselves against patent infringement claims in court. Once they had the needed information they quickly essentially created an exact replication of Nintendo’s system in their cartridges so their games worked perfectly fine and the 10NES chip on the console would regard them as valid with no need to hit it with a voltage spike.
Nintendo sued Atari and initially won, but it was widely believed elements of Nintendo’s patent would not stand up to great scrutiny and Nintendo and Atari settled the matter. If you remember any black-cartridge NES games, those were probably Tengen games. Some of the more popular games they put out were RBI Baseball 2/3 (1 was properly licensed, and one of only 3-4 licensed games Tengen created before it circumvented the 10NES chip), Ms. Pac Man and several other Namco titles were ported as unlicensed Tengen games. Another unlicensed game manufacturer was Wisdom Tree, they had light-blue cartridges and later black cartridges just like Tengen. They are very popular amongst some gamers today due to their novelty factor: Wisdom Tree made Christian games that were usually incredibly strange/surreal and sometimes violent. One of their titles you literally would fight your way through a seedy part of town brutally killing drug addicts with swords, and randomly angels would stop you and ask you bible trivia, failure to answer correctly could kill your character.
I should also mention that by and large Nintendo’s Seal of Quality program did not seem to, by itself, run afoul of anti-trust laws. Even when Nintendo was 80% of the video game console market.
Where Nintendo actually got in trouble was they started pressuring retailers to not sell any games that did not carry the Seal of Quality, and even went so far as to refuse to deal with retailers that did sell unlicensed games. Since Nintendo had 80% of the game market, a retailer that was unable to sell Nintendo developed games and the NES console itself would have been seriously hurting. For this reason after a certain point in time it became very rare to see unlicensed games at major retailers. Nintendo also started an advertising campaign in which it emphasized that only Nintendo Seal of Quality Games were worth playing, and you were wasting your money on garbage and being vaguely immoral buying any game without the seal.
Nintendo was targeted with a class action lawsuit (Sega joined in with claims that Nintendo additionally was refusing to deal with any merchant that sold the Sega Master System, Sega’s 8 bit competitor system to the NES), Nintendo ultimately lost that suit and had to pay a penalty.
On a related topic to the OP…
You are allowed to. It’s not illegal to jailbreak it. Apple doesn’t make it easy for you, admittedly, but you are allowed to.
Thanks for sharing Martin Hyde, those were interesting points.
I think it is pretty clear that trying to limit the software that runs on your hardware device is dubious, at best.
I guess I don’t understand why a manufacturer can’t specify the type of attachments used for it’s own devices. If people start using non-apple approved software and the stability of the OS is effected or holes for viruses open up, why shouldn’t Apple be able to say that isn’t allowed?
I think Apples ability to limit the type of software on their machines is one of the things that make their system so good. If you don’t like it, you can buy an Android.
They don’t limit what you can do with their computers. This seems to me to be a weak argument. It is not like Apple is making any sort of guarantee on the fitness of apps you get from the app store.
Because the devices aren’t Apple’s devices. They ours. We paid for them. It’s our property, and we’re free to do with our property what we want.
Apple/Microsoft/Nintendo can try to stop that via software, but they know that there’s not much that they can do legally. Hence Cydia hasn’t been sued, for example.
The same way a Cuisinart is yours when you buy it. You should try putting you own blades into one and see what happens to your warranty.
Not according to Apple Legal.
Sorry, but I’m having trouble with your reading of peoples posts. Martin Hyde posted about nintendos security practices, and stated that they settled out of court probably because some of their patents wouldn’t be upheld.
The other case was where Nintendo refused to deal with merchanta who sold Sega titles. I don’t recall hearing Apple refusing to sell an app that’s available on another platform?
This you claim backs up your OP that Apples behaviour is “dubious”.
I compare Apple to Microsoft (and probably Sony&Nintendo) restrictions on online sales of software, and you claim they are different.
You can try to claim the fact that you can buy Xbox games from a store, but not an iphone app to be different. But I’ve also never seen an android app for sale instore either. Hell if someone came up with an easy instore distribution/purchase/installation system for phone apps I’m sure it would take off. I’m thinking of the spotpass system Nintendo has for its 3DS, something very possible with wifi enabled smartphones. Actually with the NFC technology being introduced over the next few years, this could well be on it’s way.
And this is despite the fact that the hardware manufacturers can control how many DVDs you have printed, and who prints them.
You picked up on the licensing of developement kits, but read my link
again. That was a separate license to the publishing license I linked to. It wasn’t a license about designing software, it was one about publishing it.
Fact of the matter is you don’t have to buy your apps from Apple. Jailbreak your iphone and buy stuff from Cydia. In fact there are apps there that Apple won’t authorise.
Lets try another tack as well, your phones security. I seem to recall one security alert with a standard iphone, where it could be compromised via SMS. This was back in 2009, and was closed with the next ios update (yes I agree Apple behaved shoddily in not fixing this when it was first brought to their attention). There was also a piece of software for jailbroken iphones that contained a trojan. Otherwise I am not aware of any iphone viruses doing the rounds.
Android phones, on the other hand, have a wide choice of app sites. And also have an array of antivirus apps available. So perhaps Apple are correct in limiting the availability of apps to their basic customers. If that keeps viruses from spreading, piracy of games down and (unless/until they suffer a hack like the PSN) protect their customers data, is it a bad thing?
They can say “tough shit if you have problems”. They can void your warranty, decline customer support, and even block you from downloading system updates. But they have no right to actually dictate what people do.
That merely means that Apple disclaims all continuing responsibility to the customer (such as warranty and customer support) if they violate this “agreement”. It does not mean that they can (or even that they are trying to) force people not to jailbreak or otherwise modify their devices.
who is dictating anything? You can jailbreak your iPad if you want.
They’re exactly the same for software that does not come on physical media.
With the Xbox you get the SDK from Microsoft and distribute exclusively via Xbox Live.
With the iDevices you get the SDK from Apple and distribute exclusively via the App Store.
The only difference is that the Xbox can also play DVDs, so that is a possible distribution method as well, although this does require a payment to Microsoft for every copy sold. Also, the iDevices have no equivalent system as there is no form of removable media, it is download or nothing.