How Apple Cheats

1) you still own your phone. Don't be silly. Jailbreak and builds apps to your hearts content. Vendors can choose who and what they allow in their store. Physical or otherwise.

2) apple makes virtually all the profits on consumer hardware, but has Tiny market share. Really. It's no an abuse of a monopoly if 20 percent of people can't use a private API on their telephone.

3)equating access to private APIs in a private store with morality is a truly warped view of the world and a disservice to actual issues with morality society faces.

> The problem is, there are more Content Providers in the system than are documented in that package, and while you can use them, you probably shouldn’t. They’re there because some of the Google-provided apps use them internally to access their own data resources. Because Android is an open-source project, it’s easy enough to find them just by running shell commands like find and grep over the source tree.

> [...]

> Back to Content Providers. For example, there’s one inside the built-in Messaging (A.K.A. texting or SMS) app that it uses to display and search your history. Just because it’s there doesn’t mean you should use it. The Android team isn’t promising that it’ll be the same in the next release or even that it’ll be there in the next release.

> So, go ahead and look at the undocumented Content Providers; the code is full of good ideas to learn from. But don’t use them. And if you do, when bad things happen you’re pretty well on your own.

http://android-developers.blogspot.de/2010/05/be-careful-wit... http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/05/06/Private-AP...

The main point here is that you are on the same level of Google: if you want you can use those private APIs, but be ready to do a lot of work to keep your application working fine.

This is from Joel Spolsky's Strategy Letter II: Chicken and Egg Problems http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000054.html

So Windows 3.x on Intel 80386s was the first version that could run multiple DOS programs respectably. (Technically, Windows 386 could too, but 80386s were rare and expensive until about the time that Windows 3.0 came out.) Windows 3.0 was the first version that could actually do a reasonable job running all your old software.

Windows 95? No problem. Nice new 32 bit API, but it still ran old 16 bit software perfectly. Microsoft obsessed about this, spending a big chunk of change testing every old program they could find with Windows 95. Jon Ross, who wrote the original version of SimCity for Windows 3.x, told me that he accidentally left a bug in SimCity where he read memory that he had just freed. Yep. It worked fine on Windows 3.x, because the memory never went anywhere. Here's the amazing part: On beta versions of Windows 95, SimCity wasn't working in testing. Microsoft tracked down the bug and added specific code to Windows 95 that looks for SimCity. If it finds SimCity running, it runs the memory allocator in a special mode that doesn't free memory right away. That's the kind of obsession with backward compatibility that made people willing to upgrade to Windows 95.