The sheer outrage was palpable across the internet today as iOS developer Tapbots announced a refreshed version of its Twitter client Tweetbot, and charged users for it. As The Verge pointed out:

Tweetbot 3 for iPhone gets a fresh new design, but at a price

That price was a shocking $2.99, enough, according to ‘back of an envelope’ calculations to feed a family of four for a month. It’s no wonder The Verge then continued:

Tweetbot 3’s new design will be controversial, but so will its price.

Everyone has reason to be disgusted. It’s a well known fact that iOS developers don’t have expenses and in fact survive solely on a diet of unicorns and Jony Ive’s tears, living in houses powered by rainbows. And if you’ve owned the old version of Tweetbot since its original release in August 2011, it will have so far cost you a penny a week, which is enough to stretch the budget of any typical consumer.

That Tapbots is now charging for an update shows how little the company thinks of its audience, and is entirely unacceptable. The only logical response is for everyone to smash their iPhones to pieces in a rage or, alternatively, whine on Twitter about how unfair it is to pay $2.99 for an app they’ll use daily for many months on a $500+ iPhone.

Following my previous work on iOS 7 and balance/motion issues, I was asked to write about the subject for The Guardian. My article  Why iOS 7 is making some users sick talks to developers (one of whom suffers from motion sickness), vestibular disorder experts, and John Golding, professor of applied psychology at the University of Westminster. The article provides, I believe, a succinct and thorough overview of the problem and what Apple can do to fix it, and yet still there are doubters and naysayers. Therefore, I’d like to address a few comments I’ve been repeatedly receiving or seeing over the past week:

The Reduce Motion option fixes the problem. Actually, it does very little—it merely turns off the parallax effect on home screens, and not zooms/slide transitions. It does help some people but not others.

Not everyone with motion sickness is affected, and so those who claim they are must be lying. Nope. These disorders affect people very differently. Just because you can’t read in a car and yet iOS 7 doesn’t affect you, that doesn’t mean others will have the same experience. Also, just because you aren’t affected, that doesn’t mean countless others won’t be. Just be thankful—not a troll.

Screen-based motion/balance problems cannot happen because of small screens. This is something I’ve seen in the recent glut of US-based articles. If this were the case, no-one would be suffering. (My own theory is that devices are bright and tend to be used fairly close to your face, and so although peripheral vision exists to anchor you, the screen overrides that.)

The slide transitions were never a problem before, so they can’t be now. Actually, they always were, and they continue to be in Windows 8, Android and other operating systems. The problem with iOS 7 is the overall effect is worse. Also, Apple usually does better when it comes to accessibility. Here, it’s dropped the ball.

This story only exists because the press needs to bash Apple again and again. I don’t doubt there’s going to be an element of that. Apple stories get page views. An Apple problem gets more. But this is about accessibility and disability. I didn’t really care about the iPhone 4 antenna. It was a mild issue with a product that could be dealt with easily. I do care about people who are adversely affected by using their devices.

I’m some kind of Apple hater. This one’s particularly fun, because I’m usually accused of being an Apple fan-boy. If I’m a hater, that comes as quite a surprise, what with me being a contributor to a bunch of Mac mags and owning a reasonably diverse selection of Apple kit.

People are idiots for upgrading. Not everyone reads tech blogs. Almost no-one reads upgrade notes. Most people see an upgrade button and tap or click it without thinking. Importantly, even those who do might not have had any motion/balance problems before iOS 7. I knew what I was potentially letting myself in for, being a tech journo, although the end result was actually worse than I’d feared it would be—at least on the iPad. But I’d say a tech journo is rather more of an outlier than a typical consumer!

If you are having issues with iOS 7, please share the stories I’ve written, and write your own. Most importantly, tell Apple by emailing a succinct explanation of your problems to accessibility@apple.com, and request the means to disable relevant features.

If you’re not having issues with iOS 7, please just have a little empathy. I realise it’s hard to understand invisible conditions if you don’t suffer from them, but they are very real, and they affect many millions of people daily.

Apple has a problem with animation. In the past, I’ve written about how OS X’s full-screen animations and transitions gave me motion-sickness, leaving dizziness and nausea in their wake. ReSpaceApp/TotalSpaces was a partial solution, but only overrides full-screen slide transitions, and not other OS-level animation. I wrote directly to Apple execs and accessibility@apple.com; having (unsurprisingly) had no response from anyone, I then penned an open letter about motion sickness triggers in OS X Mavericks and iOS 7.

Within the last of those, I was at the time concerned about iOS 7. My fears weren’t unfounded. I’ve now updated my devices and have the same feeling I got on using OS X Lion’s full-screen for the first time. Right now, the iPhone is bearable, but aspects of the iPad are unusable. The app switcher in particular has such aggressive animation and zooming that a single use is enough to trigger dizziness.

I’m not alone. I found vestibular support organisations were hugely concerned about iOS 7. I’ve had many people email and tweet me about these issues, in some cases practically begging for a solution. There isn’t one. I’ve been told about 50 times now to activate ‘Reduce Motion’ in iOS 7, but all that does is remove the home screen parallax—it doesn’t stop the zooming and sliding elsewhere. Obviously, it also doesn’t ‘fix’ OS X for me and others either.

Worse, there’s some major ignorance within the market regarding vestibular conditions. On Friday, I wrote a news piece for Stuff.tv on iOS 7 triggering vertigo and nausea symptoms. This was well received by those suffering, but not by others. I’ve been called a “bullshitter” and a “pansy”; some people helpfully argued that I should “just fuck off and use Android then”, while others said I was “just another idiot finding something else Apple’s done to complain about”.

As someone who’s regularly accused of being an Apple shill, it’s curious I’m now considered the opposite. Also, there appears to be a misunderstanding regarding what people like me actually want. We don’t want to destroy your precious operating systems. We don’t even want to remove those dynamic zooms and swipes you love so much. We merely want a setting that will optionally enable you to do so. That’s it.

I’d like nothing more from Apple than to be able to go to the accessibility settings in OS X Mavericks and iOS 7 and see ‘disable animation effects’. For most people, this option existing won’t affect them. But for many people currently suffering various motion symptoms through standard device use, it will offer a level of delight like no other Apple update. For them, devices will suddenly become truly magical.

Further reading: Why Is Apple Ignoring People with Vision and Balance Problems? (Kirk McElhearn)

The App Store today turned five, and Apple’s been celebrating by making a bunch of apps and games free. (Top tip: they’re all worth a download.) Today’s app landscape is incredible. Apple reckons over 900,000 apps are available, and devs have made billions of dollars from iOS. Not bad for a platform that on launch had just 500 titles.

But which apps have really stood out over the years? Which have influenced those that came later? I knocked heads with Stuff’s editor and we came up with ten apps that changed everything. Doubtless, you’ll have your own thoughts on which apps were hugely important; if so, please leave a comment on the Stuff article (or here, if you like).

I hope you enjoy reading the feature and that it brings back some warm memories!

You’d think the BBC might have learned, but after mis-quoting Paul Chambers’ Twitter Joke Trial tweet as part of a general ‘bereft of senses’/social media shitstorm, it’s now done much the same with Justin Carter case: Should online jokes be criminal?

If you’re unfamiliar with the story, US teen Justin Carter unwisely posted something stupid online and an anonymous tip-off led to him languishing in jail on suicide watch, faced with a potentially lengthy jail sentence. What did he post? Well, according to the BBC, this:

I think Ima shoot up a kindergarten

And watch the blood of the innocent rain down

And eat the beating heart of one of them.

Dumb, right? I mean, really dumb. But, you know, he’s a teenager, and, as reported by the Washington Times and plenty of other places:

the next two lines were lol and jk,” said Jack Carter, Justin’s father.

You won’t see those lines in the BBC’s article.

I don’t doubt people should think more before they rattle off some kind of obscene stupidity online, and it’s true online ‘anonymity’ leads certain people to be, frankly, arseholes, safe and secure in the knowledge the person or people they’re broadcasting to won’t be able to retaliate. However, organisations like the BBC do no-one any favours by shaving off bits of the story. An exclamation mark and word or two in the Chambers tweet, and the ‘lol’/’jk’ additions in the Carter case totally change the context of what was written.

Fortunately, the BBC’s article subsequently at least attempts a level of balance, exploring both sides of this kind of incident. That said, I do worry that we’re now seeing government agencies attempting to make examples of people, in order to stifle any kind of online dissent. If not, they’ve actually lost the ability to distinguish between idiotic banter and genuine threats, which is just as big a concern.