Posted March 5th, 2010
by admin
It’s official: iPad’s launching in the US on April 3, with the 3G model coming later in the month. Pre-orders start next week, March 12. It’s just about on time.
April 3, interestingly, is a Saturday, and exactly 59 66 days after the iPad launch, placing it just outside the 60 availability window Jobs promised for the non-3G model. Apple’s still not setting an exact date for the 3G model, promising late April, meaning it stay within the 90-day cocoon. Pre-orders start a week from today.
For folks uh-broad—Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK—both vanilla Wi-Fi and 3G models are launching simultaneously in “late April.”
While we now know it’s April 3, what we’re still wondering about D-Day: How many native iPad apps are launching with it? Will there be lines? (Well, probably.) But will there be shortages, as some analysts have suggested? Also, Apple says iPad will be available through “select Authorized Retailers.” Does that mean Best Buy will get in on the launch action?
So, raise your hand if you’re waiting for the 3G model!
iPad Available in US on April 3
Pre-Order on March 12
CUPERTINO, Calif., March 5 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Apple® today announced that its magical and revolutionary iPad will be available in the US on Saturday, April 3, for Wi-Fi models and in late April for Wi-Fi + 3G models. In addition, all models of iPad will be available in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK in late April.
Beginning a week from today, on March 12, US customers can pre-order both Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi + 3G models from Apple’s online store (www.apple.com) or reserve a Wi-Fi model to pick up on Saturday, April 3, at an Apple retail store.
“iPad is something completely new,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We’re excited for customers to get their hands on this magical and revolutionary product and connect with their apps and content in a more intimate, intuitive and fun way than ever before.”
Starting at just $499, iPad lets users browse the web, read and send email, enjoy and share photos, watch videos, listen to music, play games, read ebooks and much more. iPad is just 0.5 inches thick and weighs just 1.5 pounds-thinner and lighter than any laptop or netbook-and delivers battery life of up to 10 hours.*
iPad’s revolutionary Multi-Touch™ interface makes surfing the web an entirely new experience, dramatically more interactive and intimate than on a computer. You can read and send email on iPad’s large screen and almost full-size “soft” keyboard or import photos from a Mac®, PC or digital camera, see them organized as albums, and enjoy and share them using iPad’s elegant slideshows. iPad makes it easy to watch movies, TV shows and YouTube, all in HD, or flip through the pages of an ebook you downloaded from Apple’s new iBookstore while listening to your music collection.
The App Store on iPad lets you wirelessly browse, buy and download new apps from the world’s largest app store. iPad includes 12 new innovative apps designed especially for iPad and will run almost all of the more than 150,000 apps on the App Store, including apps already purchased for your iPhone® or iPod touch®. Developers are already creating exciting new apps designed for iPad that take advantage of its Multi-Touch interface, large screen and high-quality graphics.
The new iBooks app for iPad includes Apple’s new iBookstore, the best way to browse, buy and read books on a mobile product. The iBookstore will feature books from the New York Times Best Seller list from both major and independent publishers, including Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan Publishers, Penguin Group and Simon & Schuster.
The iTunes® Store gives iPad users access to the world’s most popular online music, TV and movie store with a catalog of over 12 million songs, over 55,000 TV episodes and over 8,500 films including over 2,500 in stunning high definition. All the apps and content you download on iPad from the App Store, iTunes Store and iBookstore will be automatically synced to your iTunes library the next time you connect with your computer.
Pricing & Availability
iPad will be available in Wi-Fi models on April 3 in the US for a suggested retail price of $499 for 16GB, $599 for 32GB, $699 for 64GB. The Wi-Fi + 3G models will be available in late April for a suggested retail price of $629 for 16GB, $729 for 32GB and $829 for 64GB. iPad will be sold in the US through the Apple Store® (www.apple.com), Apple’s retail stores and select Apple Authorized Resellers.
iPad will be available in both Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi + 3G models in late April in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK. International pricing will be announced in April. iPad will ship in additional countries later this year.
The iBooks app for iPad including Apple’s iBookstore will be available as a free download from the App Store in the US on April 3, with additional countries added later this year.
*Battery life depends on device settings, usage and other factors. Actual results vary.
Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Today, Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning computers, OS X operating system and iLife and professional applications. Apple is also spearheading the digital media revolution with its iPod portable music and video players and iTunes online store, and has entered the mobile phone market with its revolutionary iPhone.
© 2010 Apple Inc. All rights reserved. Apple, the Apple logo, Mac, Mac OS, Macintosh, Multi-Touch, iPhone, iPod touch, iTunes and Apple Store are trademarks of Apple. Other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.
[Apple]
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Posted March 2nd, 2010
by admin
Mozilla’s Firefox web browser was one of the first to optimize for today’s JavaScript-heavy web pages. Mozilla’s new Tracemonkey JavaScript engine — released with Firefox 3.5 — put the browser at the top of most page rendering speed tests. But lately, Google Chrome, Apple’s Safari and the coming Opera 10.5 have been beating Firefox at its own game.
Mozilla is hoping to change that with some new improvements to Tracemonkey that promise to make Firefox even faster — particularly on JavaScript-heavy websites like Gmail or Facebook.
The new project — JagerMonkey, as it’s known — is built on top of Tracemonkey and borrows its assembler from Apple’s open source Nitro JavaScript engine. As JagerMonkey programmer David Mandeli writes on his blog: “we know [Nitro] is simple and fast from looking at it before… it’s open-source, and it’s well-designed C++, so it was a great fit.”
The goal of JagerMonkey is to cover a couple of blind spots in Tracemonkey’s JavaScript rendering process. Most JavaScript can be compiled “just in time,” that is, optimized by turning it from JavaScript into much faster native code. When that’s possible, Tracemonkey’s performance matches that of Chrome, Safari and Opera.
However, not all of the web’s JavaScript can be converted to native code the way Tracemonkey currently works. Mandeli has a detailed explanation of what sort of code doesn’t work and why, but the short story is that when Tracemonkey doesn’t kick in, Firefox is still rendering that code at the same speed it was in 2007 — in other words, very slowly by today’s standards.
JagerMonkey will change that, handling the code that the existing Tracemonkey engine cannot.
Of course it will be some time before JagerMonkey makes it into Firefox proper. In fact, as of right now it isn’t even in the Firefox nightly builds. If you really must try it for yourself right now, you’ll find a link to the source code on the Mozilla wiki.
So far, the project doesn’t have a roadmap and the wiki page indicates that there are still many optimizations to be done, but when JagerMonkey finally lands, it may well put Firefox back on top in the web browser speed wars.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons, PD
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Posted March 2nd, 2010
by admin
People rarely talk about iPhone app piracy, but when they do, it sounds devastating: 90% piracy rates, $450 million in lost sales, etc. Here’s the truth: App Store piracy isn’t a big deal—and it never will be.
With these shockingly high reports comes the general air that developers are being marauded and pillaged by Viking hordes and that Apple isn’t doing enough to stop it. This resonates! Developers don’t control much about the App Store, so if the entire app protection system has been cracked—which it has—you’d expect the looting to be wholesale; the impact on developers to be immediate and devastating; and the problem to be grave indeed.
And yet the piracy issue seems to be dying. The story behind the lack of a story, it turns out, is that iPhone piracy is nowhere near as serious as many people say it is, and that before long, it may not be a problem at all.
How It Works
It’s tough to talk about iPhone app piracy without tacitly endorsing it. The mere mention of DRM cracking methods and application sources is—or rather, was—enough to send people looking, and presumably, stealing. But look at the piracy subscene today reveals that, like the jailbreak scene it’s a part of, it’s just not the same as it used to be.
Kicking off your career in app theft isn’t too hard, and it’ll only take a few minutes of Googling to get the full instructions. Still, I’ll keep this as abstract as possible. Here’s how you do it:
• Jailbreak your iPhone or iPod
• Open Cydia, the jailbreak equivalent of the App Store, and add a particular download source that isn’t part of the default lineup
• Download two apps: One that lets you crack apps you’ve purchased for the benefit of others; and another that lets you install cracked applications yourself
• Download cracked apps to your heart’s content, from various sources around the internet
At the peak, there were sites that aggregated huge numbers of download links together into an easily browsable website, which meant that once your phone was cracked, you could tap through these websites like you’d browse the App Store—links to the latest apps were plentiful, and you could snag that game you just read about on Gizmodo within a day or so, tops.
The most popular of these sites, called Appulo.us, disappeared just last month, leaving pirates without a centralized resource for apps. Soon, torrent sites and carbon copied link-dumps picked up the slack, at least for people dedicated and savvy enough to find them. So, yeah, piracy is alive, to be sure. But how serious is it?
The Problem
I wanted to find out how bad piracy was, so I went straight to the developers. I started with the types of apps I thought would be least vulnerable, just to set a baseline: Productivity apps. The verdict? Yes! Piracy happens!
“Roughly 10% of our paid app users are coming from piracy.” That’s Guy Goldstein, CEO of PageOnce, the company behind Personal Assistant, a top-selling organizational app. This is pretty stunning, if you think about it. Personal Assistant is available in a fairly full-featured free version, and as useful as it is, it’s not the most glamourous of apps—it’s a utility, not a flashy game. The paid version tracks a little high for a productivity app, at $7, but not matter how you slice it, Personal Assistant isn’t the most obvious target for piracy. Nor, apparently, is it a serious victim: “Although i think piracy is generally bad and negatively effects companies, for us it’s not big issue—our business model is based on purchasing, but also advertising. The more users we have, the better.” Right, so piracy is happening here, but it doesn’t really matter. Let’s move onto the people who you’d really expect to be getting ripped off.
I contacted TomTom, whose navigation apps start above $50. They were cagey. Cagey and brief:
TomTom takes piracy very seriously. Per corporate policy, we do not disclose information about our ongoing efforts to disrupt software theft.
So I moved on to their direct competitor, Navigon, whose MobileNavigator North America app runs $90:
Navigon is well aware of hacked iPhone Apps. As with any other software, it is only a question of time when applications are being hacked and distributed illegally. There’s no security mechanism available to prevent this 100%. Since hacking of additional application functions, which are available through Apple’s In App Purchase mechanism, is more difficult, this helps to better secure Apps from software piracy. Our legal department is watching this very thoroughly and Navigon will fight piracy with all legal means.
Less cagey, and more ragey. But this is an official position—a conversation with a Navigon rep left me with the impression that while they don’t condone piracy, obviously, it wasn’t exactly the Issue of the Day. Ripe targets that they are, nav companies don’t seem to be losing sleep over this. Which leaves the game developers.
What apps are more pirateable than games? They’re shiny, they’re extremely popular, and they’re often expensive. Surely the EAs and Gamelofts of the world are the hardest hit, right?
On record, they basically clammed up. Off the record, though, they were a bit more free. A rep from one of the largest studios—you’ve probably played one of their games if you have an iPhone—told me “It happens, but I don’t think it’s that big of an issue.” I couldn’t coax out any specific stats, but in relation to total sales, piracy figures are “small.”
In fact, it was hard to come by hard piracy figures from any major developers, but one thing is certain: The occasionally reported 50%+ piracy rates are rare among major developers. And overwhelmingly, major devs are underwhelmed by the problem. So, where are all the pirates?
The Jailbreak Factor
Peter Farago, a VP at iPhone analytics firm Flurry—the guys who spotted the iPad in their logs days before it was announced—track roughly one out of every five apps purchased from the App Store, and their software runs deep: Though it doesn’t collect individualized personal data, it can tell if a device running a tracked app is jailbroken or not. In other words, Flurry knows exactly how many of the millions of devices its tracked apps are installed on are jailbroken. Take a guess.
It’s… as low as you might expect. Lower, even.
“Under 10% of the iPhone installed base is jailbroken.”
Just to make this clear, a company that at any given time is tracking five out of the top ten most downloaded apps in the App Store is detecting a jailbreak rate of under 10%. Less than one out of ten, and often significantly less. The figure tends to bottom out at just above 5% after every time Apple issues a software upgrade, slowly creeping back up to previous levels as the Dev Team and the like issue updates to the jailbreak software. Bear in mind, jailbreaking is a prerequisite for app piracy, but not every jailbreaker is running even one pirated app. Start peeling off the people who jailbreak just to enable multitasking or Wi-Fi tethering, or to skin their iPhone, or just to see what all the fuss is about, and “under 10%” starts to looks even slimmer.
Given the state of jailbreaking, I find these numbers easy to believe. Back in 2007, before there was an App Store, jailbreaking was as easy as opening a website in Mobile Safari. Today, it’s a bit more difficult, and depending on which iPhone you have, sometimes impossible. (Sorry, late model 3GSers!) And Farago says it’s always under siege: “There’s a cycle that exists, but basically, it’s this kind of thing that happens—every time there’s an OS swap, it goes away for a while,” dipping by “a few percent” before creeping back up to previous levels.
Now, I don’t want to play down these numbers, because even a tiny percentage of a user base as large as the iPhone’s is enough to throw a developers’ pirated/paid stats out of whack—this can happen, and cases in which pirated downloads exceed paid downloads have been documented—but such stats are misleading. Without even having to speculate about what percentage of pirates would have otherwise purchased the app, they represent a small portion of the app-buying population. In such small numbers, jailbreakers simply can’t screw a developer over, except in those rare cases in which the developer has to pay significant continuing costs to deliver data and services once an app is installed. Even then, Flurry finds that pirated apps are often launched just a handful of times after they’re downloaded.
With the App Store offering most—though not all—of what the jailbreak scene used to provide, cracking your phone, going through the trouble of ducking regular upgrades and enduring the constant fear of rendering your phones permanently useless just isn’t that attractive anymore. To be a pirate right now, you really have to want to be a pirate. This isn’t Napster. This is Usenet. And pirates aren’t potential customers. They’re pirates.
Why Developers Don’t Care
At first I found many developers’ silence on the issue curious. But after talking to a few, and finding out the scale of the problem, it makes sense: An app developer has nothing to gain by taking their fight public—Apple is clearly aware of the issue, and it’s not like you can somehow convince hardcore pirates to start paying for all the dozens of apps they steal, because they were never going to buy them in the first place. To these people they’re literally just free samples, and are most frequently treated as such. Developers do have something to lose, be it investor confidence (a lot of studios are heavily funded by VCs, who probably don’t want to hear about any theft problems), a relationship with Apple (who would most likely prefer that developers discussed app DRM cracking and piracy privately), or the goodwill of the public, who aren’t usually going to feel sympathy for a company anyway.
Most importantly, if developers do have a problem with piracy—say that, like PageOnce, they found themselves prominently featured on one of the more popular pirated app repositories—they can do something about it.
When an app is cracked, that is to say that its DRM has been stripped, and the app has been reduced to an unprotect .IPA file, ready for sideloading through a jailbreak utility. But in the middle of 2009, Apple introduced a system by which app developers could sell services or add-ons from within their apps. This was good way for paid apps to extend their profitability, and the in-app purchases were effectively unpirateable.
Then, in October, Apple changed the rules: In-app purchases were allowed in free applications as well, meaning that developers could provide free trial apps that could be upgraded to full versions by way of in-app purchases. Popular apps could consolidate their free and paid versions into one app, and on the way, make piracy all but impossible. After all, what’s the point in cracking and bootlegging an app anyone can get for free?
Apple even says as much (albeit with no lack of redundancy): “Using In App Purchase in your app can also help combat some of the problems of software piracy by allowing you to verify In App Purchases.”
Ngmoco took their fight against piracy public last year, quoting impressively high unauthorized download figures during new apps’ first days in the app store. Today, nearly their entire product lineup is based on on the in-app upgrade model. And even after the transition, Ngmoco insists that piracy wasn’t the motivating factor in their switch. In an interview with TouchArcade, it was the massively high download rates for free apps, vs paid apps, that lured Ngmoco toward in-app purchases. The elimination of piracy was a pleasant side effect, at best.
The moral of the story for developers? If you think you have a problem with piracy, you probably don’t. If you still think you have a problem with piracy, you can stamp it out. Simple as that.
In-app purchases change the way developers market and sell their apps, and just as much, the way we consume them. Downloading a single app and then purchasing expansions for it is a superficially different procedure than downloading a free trial followed by a full app, or just taking a risk on a full app in the first place. But the way in which your transaction happens is different, too.
When you buy an iPhone app, it can be synced to multiple devices, as long as said devices are authorized on your iPhone account—the cap here if five, but that’s enough to share amongst your family or friends, or to enable an easy transition from an old iPhone to a new one. In-app purchases, however, don’t work the same way, at all. Here’s what Apple says about syncing in-app purchases across devices:
• Consumable products must be purchased each time the user needs that item. For example, one-time services are commonly implemented as consumable products.
• Nonconsumable products are purchased only once by a particular user. Once a nonconsumable product is purchased, it is provided to all devices associated with that user’s iTunes account. Store Kit provides built-in support to restore nonconsumable products on multiple devices.
• Subscriptions share attributes of consumable and nonconsumable products. Like a consumable product, a subscription may be purchased multiple times; this allows you to implement your own renewal mechanism in your application. However, subscriptions must be provided on all devices associated with a user. In App Purchase expects subscriptions to be delivered through an external server that you provide. You must provide the infrastructure to deliver subscriptions to multiple devices.
Problem is, this isn’t how it works right now. In-app goods are sold on a strict per-device basis, because the only user information available to developers is the device identifier, not the account identifier. As it stands, when you buy something by way of an in-app purchase, it applies to your phone only, and not all the registered devices—iPhones and iPod Touches—on your iTunes account. Maybe that’s no big deal now, but when the iPad arrives, this might become a problem.
Pirates… From the FUTURE
App piracy today may not be a massive factor in the App Store economy, but it would be wrong to characterize it as nothing. It does exist, and to a developer who makes money selling apps, even one illegally downloaded app is one too many. Still, looking forward, this issue is clearing up almost completely:
• iPhone app piracy is already low, and isn’t on the rise in any meaningful way
• The latest iPhone 3GS has proven very difficult to jailbreak, and Apple seems to be actively thwarting efforts with each baseband/software release
• In-app purchasing is coming of age, and effectively eliminates piracy
If you want to call the iPhone pirate a species, he would be an endangered one; if you want to call the jailbreak scene a subculture, it would be passé; if you want to call app piracy a problem, it would be more nuisance than crisis.
Apple’s pending extermination of piracy is great news for developers, but for users, it’ll come at a cost. And for want of an example as to why, this post couldn’t come at a better time, with Apple purging “offensive” apps from its official store—increasingly be the only place for iPhone owners to download apps. If Apple wants to be the only provider of apps (and they do!) then they need to be held to a high standard of transparency and consistency, which—trust us—they’re nowhere near meeting.
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Google’s premiere developer event is coming up in just a couple of months, and we’ve got two passes to give away.
