Orn Malik for GigaOM is shocked that terrible free game Cut the Birds (which manages to simultaneously rip off Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja) ended up on the App Store. I’m not. Despite reports that Apple’s policing of the store is draconian, it’s anything but these days. It’s commonplace to see IP rips on the store, and I’ve chanced upon lifts from Pac-Man, Mario and other famous brands.

Generally, Apple’s pretty good at removing infringing properties when challenged (and that was even the case with an indie dev I know whose game and game name were stolen wholesale), and it’s tough to think what Apple should be doing instead. It could act as more of a gatekeeper, rejecting more IP that obviously infringes, but such action is likely to be inconsistently applied, and most likely to only protect big companies by default. Furthermore, it’s not like Apple’s alone in this—myriad cases of IP theft also exist on the Android Marketplace, for example.

Still, that such blatant IP theft has made it to the App Store does no-one any favours, not least SolverLabs (amusing strapline: “The world class software labs”—OHO!), who may find themselves minus one iOS dev account once Apple’s team lumbers into view.

Kenny Hemphill for MacUser:

There’s been a great deal written over the last few days about Samsung apparently overtaking Apple to become the world’s biggest smartphone handset manufacturer by sales volume. But is it really true?

Spoiler: probably not.

I’m a huge fan of Marco Arment’s Instapaper and usually enjoy his blog, but in Double-dipping, he offers an opinion that, as a guy who writes for magazines, rubs me up the wrong way:

I bought my first iPad magazine1 last weekend: one issue of The New Yorker. […] As I was flipping through it, when I saw the first of many full-page ads, I was offended. I thought, “I paid good money for this and it’s full of ads?”

Consumers have tolerated double-dipping — products that cost customers money and have ads — for over a century.

Double-dipping? An interesting term for advertising. In reality, adverts are a subsidy. Without them, magazines would cost more, and I’ll bet—given that magazines are already often quite expensive—that would anger readers more than a few ads they can skip astonishingly easily.

It doesn’t feel as offensive in contexts that have always had it, such as printed newspapers and magazines, or cable TV.

Ads in digital magazines are a swipe to shift away. They’re easier to skip than adverts on TV.

Maybe these different standards are because the contexts are so different: magazines, newspapers, and TV all feel cheap, since they’ve shat on consumers to make a few more cents for decades,

Just… wow. I remember when I was a kid and bought chunky videogame magazines for about a pound. Typically, in those days, they would be 50 per cent adverts. In some cases, I actually quite liked the adverts; even if I didn’t, it was clear from responses in the letters pages that without them, I’d be paying three quid for the magazine instead of one. This didn’t make me feel like I was being “shat on”—it made me realise that I was getting the same content, but for less money, with the compromise being some ads I could very easily ignore.

Adverts are only really a problem if they’re horribly intrusive, such as when a television show is astonishingly badly cut, or when websites shove ads in your face before you see any content.

… but the iPad or a well-designed website are clean, high quality, and customer-centric.

Or maybe it’s just me. I just don’t feel comfortable paying for an iPad or web publication, no matter how good it is, and then having ads shoved down my throat. It makes me feel ripped off: what did I pay for?

How about the content, and the wages of the people who write the content, and who design the app?

Michael Degusta, writing Android Orphans: Visualizing a Sad History of Support:

It appears to be a widely held viewpoint that there’s no incentive for smartphone manufacturers to update the OS: because manufacturers don’t make any money after the hardware sale, they want you to buy another phone as soon as possible. If that’s really the case, the phone manufacturers are spectacularly dumb: ignoring the 2 year contract cycle & abandoning your users isn’t going to engender much loyalty when they do buy a new phone. Further, it’s been fairly well established that Apple also really only makes money from hardware sales, and yet their long term update support is excellent.

In other words, Apple’s way of getting you to buy a new phone is to make you really happy with your current one, whereas apparently Android phone makers think they can get you to buy a new phone by making you really unhappy with your current one.

Degusta adds that such motives and intent might not be real, but it’s certainly how an awful lot of the Android ecosystem comes across, and the chart he presents is hugely depressing.

Hat-tip: Matt Gemmell.

With the publication of Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography, the internet exploded over the following quote about an Apple TV (as opposed to the Apple TV):

It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud… It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it

Without the book, I’m not sure in what context the quote was placed, but the idea of an Apple TV isn’t new. And, predictably, opinions range from the extremes of thinking an Apple TV would be the best thing ever, to people who think Apple would be crazy to enter the TV space.

I’m in two minds. People argued cellphones were a crazy move for Apple: they were cheap, regularly disposed of, and there was little potential for disruption. The iPhone has since proved otherwise. I’d certainly be interested to see how Apple could ‘reinvent’ television, but there are hurdles the company would have to clear.

Televisions are not devices that are regularly upgraded, and I’m not sure even Apple churning out shiny bi-annual upgrades would change this. Therefore, whatever kit Apple released would have to have longevity beyond even the sturdiest of iOS devices. It would also have to be competitive within the current market—not impossible, but certainly a tough ask.

Apple would also have to convince a sizeable chunk of the media industry to radically change its thinking. At present, television and movie studios are clinging to the wreckage of the 1990s, still for the most part believing in keeping media expensive and relatively inaccessible. Digital TV shows are priced on iTunes in excess of the RRP of DVDs and Blu-ray, to keep you buying shiny discs, and region-blocks of all kinds mess with worldwide commercial access to shows, despite the same shows being available as torrents mere minutes after broadcast.

Having mulled this thinking over on Twitter today, I’ve had responses along the lines of “but what about the music industry?” It’s true that Apple was disruptive there, and was also largely responsible for the current DRM-free and affordable model for individual tracks and entire albums. But whether the lesson the TV/movie industry’s learned is more along the lines of “and there’s no way that’ll happen to us” rather than being inspired will be key to any hope Apple has of making it in the world of television.

The Apple TV unit and iTunes have already shown that Apple’s clout—even while Steve Jobs was involved—isn’t always enough. TV shows remain expensive. Movies are regularly removed from rental, so users can be ‘forced’ to buy them, and then they’re plonked back once the studios realise there’s a sequel on the way. There’s no consistency to this, nor in availability worldwide. The USA’s rental and purchase selection is massively superior to the UK’s, and yet plenty of UK shows aren’t available in the US. And then there’s the TV-show rental debacle, where Apple only managed to get Fox, the BBC and Disney-related properties on board—and even then, many hit shows were absent.

But there’s still plenty of potential in the Apple TV. Drop pricing and up the range of shows and it moves from being quite a nice device to a must-have. (If you’ve a networked PC or Mac and AirVideo, it’s a suitable unit for watching shows in any format, too, rather than just those sitting in iTunes.) And so if Apple can fix these things, perhaps an Apple-branded television could also have a shot in the market.