11–20 of 235 posts
If that was their game here, I can think of many other parts of the iOS frameworks that would be kept private before UIPopoverController.
I am surprised that this is so shocking to the author. Stuff like this is expected and only logical, as wrong as it may be. Apple has been desperately trying to tie people into their eco-system and every move the company makes is a step in that direction whether it may be immediately obvious to other people or not. Also I should mention that I believe Apple is probably not the only company that promotes the use of it…
Tell me, what other "expected and only logical" things did you encounter while reading the article? I'm sure there's an alien invasion conspiracy theory in there somewhere.
Maybe Apple aren't confident with UIPopovers on iPhone and are awaiting its maturity until they let it loose. I highly doubt holding back a popover would be malice on Apple's part.
EDIT: Imagine if Apple released APIs as soon as they used them, we'd see more blog posts complaining about the reliability of an API they were promised.
I am surprised that this is so shocking to the author. Stuff like this is expected and only logical, as wrong as it may be. Apple has been desperately trying to tie people into their eco-system and every move the company makes is a step in that direction whether it may be immediately obvious to other people or not. Also I should mention that I believe Apple is probably not the only company that promotes the use of it…
I agree that stuff like this is expected but I am still shocked. I think that this kind of revelations means you never really own the iphone you have bought. It is more like a leasing. The only way to own what you buy is to switch to open alternatives.
Do you even read what you write or you just mash the keyboard and hit "reply"?
I am surprised that this is so shocking to the author. Stuff like this is expected and only logical, as wrong as it may be. Apple has been desperately trying to tie people into their eco-system and every move the company makes is a step in that direction whether it may be immediately obvious to other people or not. Also I should mention that I believe Apple is probably not the only company that promotes the use of it…
Maybe it's just me, but I really don't see what's "wrong" about Apple using private API's and workarounds that are not available to 3-rd party apps. I also don't see how this is different from about every other piece of commercial software in existence, the Windows API is well known to be full of undocumented API's that are only used by Microsoft, for example.
The only way I could interpret a commercial vendor using private API's unvailable to third party applications as 'wrong' is if they secretly use them to gain a competitive advantage over third-party vendors of competing applications. This is clearly not the case on iOS, because the whole system is already locked down, and publishing applications directly competing with Apple stock apps is explicitly disallowed in the submission guidelines. Whether you agree about that is a different thing, but there's nothing secret about it.
As far as I can tell, there also is no pattern whatsoever of Apple applications somehow using magic killer unicorn features that are unvailable to third-party apps. Did anyone ever get the impression that third-party apps on iOS are second rate compared to stock apps? I surely haven't, I'd even go as far as saying it's the opposite. Also the list of app bundle exceptions that can use UIPopoverController is so small, I expect there's a much simpler explanation here. Most likely UIPopoverController does not work reliably on iOS, except in some restricted use cases, and Apple chose to disable it for third-party apps to prevent applications with broken user interfaces or having to support UIPopOverController use cases they didn't intend to be used on smalls screens.
This won't pass Apple's automatic check for private API, but you could do some clever swizzle. IMO it's ok to use this in production (if you can get pass the app review), Apple is using them in their app anyway.
Isn't the argument that Apple makes use of private APIs as a beta test? That is, Apple will first introduce these private API restrictions, build apps around them and release the API as public once they are confident on its reliability. My understanding this is the approach with XPC and TouchID. Maybe Apple aren't confident with UIPopovers on iPhone and are awaiting its maturity until they let it loose. I highly doub…