Affiliate Disclosure
If you buy through our links, we may get a commission. Read our ethics policy.

Apple yanks widget apps, likely to add feature to iPhone OS 4

Apple has started contacting some iPhone developers to notify them that their widget apps are being delisted from the iTunes App Store, possibly making way for the company's own widget strategy.

Death to widgets

Developer Russell Ivanovic posted on his blog that his app, MyFrame by Groundhog Software, was targeted by Apple in a call that stated his app would be removed, "stating that they were doing a cull of any applications that presented widgets to the user."

Ivanovic said he earlier defended Apple's App Store policies as being straightforward, with rejection cases in his experience all being based on situations that were "extremely well documented as to what you can and can’t do."

His own rejection, based on an idea Apple imposed without prior warning, and sanctioned against an app that had previously been approved by the company, set Ivanovic off to complain directly to Steve Jobs.

Jobs reportedly replied, "We are not allowing apps that create their own desktops. Sorry." Ivanovic's app adds a layer of information over user's own photos, similar to Microsoft's Vista Gadgets or Mac OS X's Dashboard, although the app is not integrated into the iPad desktop, and is launched like any other app.

Speaking of the initial call he received, Ivanovic said, "I really do get the impression that the guy we were talking to on the phone was being as evasive as he could, even though he didn’t want to be, because he was terrified of giving us any more information than he had to."

Apple likely adding widgets to iPhone OS 4

After multitasking, the ability to run minor widget functions from the Home page is one of the primary, obvious features unique to Android. It is therefore likely that Apple would want to match that capability to prevent its own smartphone from looking deficient. It's also impossibly unlikely that Apple would want to cede that feature to a third party app.

Additionally, as AppleInsider noted in its original iPad review, Apple has removed common minor apps of the iPhone from the iPad's Home page, apps such as Stocks, Weather, and Clock that would seem to make more sense running as Home page widgets rather than full blown apps taking up the whole screen.

It is also expected that Apple will add new support for individual contacts on the Home page, similar to website URLs that act as bookmark shortcuts. Apple has already announced Folders as a new iPhone OS 4 feature, intended to organize apps together into related groups.

Apple has maintained tight control over the Home page experience, as well as its own bundled apps such as Phone, sandboxing third party developers into discrete apps and outlawing any mechanism for modifying or enhancing the appearance of the Lock or Home screens key elements of the iPhone OS experience that are tantamount to the PC desktop. Apple also blocked Google Voice on the basis that it replaces the functionally of core bundled apps.

Maintaining a strong product identity

In stark contrast, Google has allowed its partners and third party developers to make substantial changes to the core user interface in Android, resulting in different user interface layers (such as HTC's Sense UI or Motorola's Blur) which differentiate those partners' products at the expense of creating a solid identity for Android (pictured below).

While Android is often compared to Microsoft's Windows PC platform of the 1990s, Microsoft maintained increasingly strict control over the PC desktop precisely to avoid the incompatible mess of options that DOS PC makers were offering in competition to the Mac in the late 80s.

Microsoft restricted PC makers from adding their own significant user interface modifications and even forced them to bundle its own apps (including Internet Explorer) while pressuring them to avoid bundling competing apps such as Netscape and Apple's QuickTime. The result was an immediately identifiable desktop for Windows 95 and successive versions. At the same time, Microsoft also effectively killed the existing top third party apps of the day, including Word Perfect and Lotus 123, replacing them with its own Office apps ported from the Macintosh.

Microsoft has since created strong, unique desktop branding for Windows 2000, XP, Vista and Windows 7 that makes each product instantly recognizable to consumers. Apple has done the same with major versions of Mac OS X. Conspicuously absent from this strong branding are the various distributions of Linux, which all sport unique looks and in some cases, wildly divergent user interfaces. That inconsistency has also played a part in the failure of Linux to gain traction among desktop PC users.

Google has so far only seemed interested in maintaining the presence of its own "with Google" apps on Android, allowing hardware makers to deliver devices under the Android name that all look and feel very different. Whether Google will shift gears to impose tighter standards for Android, or conversely, be able to attract more attention from users with an infinite variety of choices, remains to be seen.

176 Comments

str1f3 17 Years · 572 comments

I could see widgets being far better suited towards the iPad than iPhone. With widgets and multitasking, I wonder what the potential hit is to battery life and performance considering widgets seem to always be running in the background on the Mac.

mstone 19 Years · 11503 comments

Quote:
Originally Posted by AppleInsider

It's also impossibly unlikely

impossiblyUnlikely.com I like it.

hittrj01 17 Years · 753 comments

Unless June 7th brings about shocking new revelations, I don't see any of this even mattering. From the looks of it, OS 4 is not going to have this functionality, at least not right away. And if Apple fails to impress past a faster processor, better camera, and iChat, I will be switching to the EVO. Android is looking more and more intriguing, and my wife's Eris with Android 2.1 and Sense is a very well done phone. I can only imagine what it's like on a phone as stacked as the EVO.

mstone 19 Years · 11503 comments

I was really impressed with Norton desktop back in the early 90's as it completely replaced the Windows desktop and had user modifiable icons which Windows did not have. I think that lasted about 48 hours before the MS legal machine took action and N desktop was no more.

nagromme 23 Years · 2831 comments

I can see where Apple might (possibly) be coming from. Maybe there?s not much harm, though, in letting potentially-redundant apps succeed or die on their own merits (since I?m not aware of any huge flood of successful apps like this).

Assuming, though, that the redundancy IS a problem, here?s another way to handle it:

1. Announce built-in widgets (a rumor I like, but I take it with sale) either under NDA or to the public

2. Warn existing widget app vendors that after 6 months (or some other generous transition period), they won?t be allowed. The reason will be clear, and the change won?t be sudden.

3. Let them evolve their app in a new direction OR at least make whatever they money they can during that time.

In other words, give developers a transition instead of an axe. They invested something, after all, and followed the rules in doing so. People will start to wonder ?am I next, for some unexpected reason??

I do think Apple?s controlled approach is valuable to the user, and maybe even vital to the platform (looking at the lessons of history). But I think there are better ways to handle these things. Communication with developers had been a consistent failing with the App Store program.