Over on .net, I offer my take on Twitter’s latest salvo against Twitter client devs. Personally, I think Twitter’s people are being total dicks in smacking third-party clients again. Short version: DMs will fail as of June 14 unless third-party clients utilise jump-through-hoops/user-unfriendly OAuth for login. Good luck to devs rewriting their apps and submitting iOS updates in that time-frame. Oh, and Twitter’s own apps aren’t affected, naturally, because they are “part of the service”.

Marco Arment provides an alternate take, the main argument of which appears to be:

These are the risks that you take when you base your personal happiness or your business on a single, irreplaceable, young, evolving third-party service.

Of course, he’s right in this. You are taking a risk when you base your income (or a chunk of it) on another company’s service. But Twitter’s also taking a risk in kicking out the ladder from underneath it. In controlling the platform and removing the apps that made it a success, it will piss of developers and millions of users. In offering regular hypocrisy (such as the bullshit about wanting third-party clients gone because a “consistent user experience is more crucial than ever”, despite its own clients being all over the place), it makes it so no-one can really trust what the company says. But, most importantly, as Matt Gemmell states in the article I wrote for .net:

Placing limitations on developers’ opportunities for innovation tends to be the death knell of a platform.

Twitter would argue that it wants innovation, just not in the client space. In other words, take Twitter data and do things with it. The thing is, Twitter’s users want and need innovation in the space Twitter is killing and yet not supporting fully on its own. But then Arment says, rightly:

The old Twitter is gone. The new Twitter is faster, bigger, much more stable, full of Javascript and dysfunctional hash-bang URLs, and much more interested in owning the clients that most people use. And next year’s Twitter might be radically different from today’s.

Or it might not exist at all, if it keeps screwing people over and everyone buggers off elsewhere.

Foss Patent reports that Lodsys isn’t the only troll out there threatening iOS devs. MacroSolve is also suing the pants off of anyone it thinks infringes on its not-at-all-vague patent:

MacroSolve’s patent-in-suit covers electronic forms distributed via the Internet or to mobile devices

In terms of lending itself to incredibly broad interpretations and infringement allegations, MacroSolve’s patent-in-suit is similarly dangerous as Lodsys’s in-app upgrade patent. MacroSolve is suing companies over U.S. Patent No. 7,822,816 on a “system and method for data management”, “including the steps of: creating a questionnaire; transmitting the questionnaire to a remote computer; executing the questionnaire in the remote computer to prompt a user for responses to questions of the questionnaire; transmitting the responses to a sever via a network; making the responses available on the Web.” In other words, anyone who distributes electronic forms via the Internet or to mobile devices and then collects and evaluates the answers could be accused of infringing the patent.

It baffles me that the USPTO granted this patent.

Not me. The way things are going I fully expect random indie devs to soon receive lawsuits from trolls claiming to own patents relating to:

• Using a computer to create a piece of software, and then selling that software WITHOUT GIVING US MONEY, YOU BASTARDS.
• Positioning pixels on a screen, to create an interface that users can control software through, WITHOUT GIVING US MONEY, YOU BASTARDS.
• Breathing air anywhere near a computer (or not near a computer) WITHOUT GIVING US MONEY, YOU BASTARDS.

K.C. MacLaren, director of mobile and emerging platforms at Starbucks, talking to GeekWire:

You mentioned in your talk that Android is a ‘watered down’ experience. What did you mean by that?

In a broad sense, in terms of some of the fragmentation in Android, with multiple resolutions, multiple screen sizes, different capabilities of different platforms that run Android, some users may find that they have to produce a watered down experience. They can’t deliver a consistent one. If they are using a lot of native device elements — like the accelerometer and the camera and gyroscope and all of the different pieces of the hardware — those are handled very differently on different devices. So, if you needed that, you might not be able to deliver that in a great way. You might have to take that feature out, for example.

The usual response to this is about how solid iOS is in this regard, but it’s wrong to argue there’s no fragmentation at all on iOS. New devices arrive that are more powerful and have a different feature set to old models. Ageing kit is eventually unsupported by iOS updates. And there are now three different screen resolutions. But on iOS, the low number of systems and, importantly, their general consistency in terms of behaviour, nonetheless makes them appealing to developers despite the (very slowly) increasing fragmentation. Contrast this with MacLaren’s comments: not only are there tons of Android devices available, but even hardware components don’t work consistently across all of them.

Via Curious Rat.

Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes, in September (CNet):

How can you justify renting your first-run TV shows individually for 99 cents an episode? [This would] jeopardize the sale of the same shows as a series to branded networks that pay hundreds of millions of dollars and make those shows available to loyal viewers for free.

Warner, also in September (LA times):

“We just don’t think the value proposition is a good one for us,” [Chairman Barry] Meyer told analyst Jessica Reif  in an interview at the conference. He said in his view he’d rather license whole seasons of shows rather than “open up a rental business in television at a low price.”

I’ve now been running an Apple TV since the start of 2011, and here’s what I’ve learned from the experience:

• 99 cents for a 40-minute show isn’t fantastic value, but it is good enough as an impulse purchase, and stops me from bothering to find shows via ‘alternate’ means. It’s also a cheap and usable enough system to ‘convert’ me from using ‘alternate’ means to the semi-legal one (for me) of Apple TV (see below for more on that).
• 99 cents is too much for old shows that aren’t great and also for shows that are 20 minutes in length. For those, I tend to grab DVDs on sale from the likes of Amazon; studio execs say they don’t want to harm DVD sales through digital, but the stuff I buy tends to be significantly cheaper than an Apple rental would be, because I wait for the sales.
• The single-episode rental nature of Apple TV could be a boon for studios, since it enables you to ‘test’ shows you’ve not watched before. Our household’s $1.98 test of two episodes of Lie To Me (sadly now cancelled by idiots at Fox) resulted in all 48 episodes being rented. So the studio got a total of $47.52, minus Apple’s cut. We’d have never bought the DVDs.
• There aren’t enough shows for rental on the Apple TV, meaning interest will soon dwindle.
• I don’t want to buy most shows to rewatch them (most of our DVDs have been watched once only), and there’s no way in hell I’m paying £2.49 ($3.99) for a single TV episode in HD, nor even £1.89 ($3.02) for SD. £36.99 is terrible value for a season of a show that will soon end up on DVD for half of that.

Of course, execs would also argue that, despite me paying for TV content, I’m still breaking the law, because I’m in the UK and using a US iTunes account to rent TV shows. Frankly, I’m not going to cry myself to sleep over that—TV being locked to regions is an anachronism that makes no sense whatsoever today (and the same goes for movies), and the studios are getting money they otherwise wouldn’t have gotten.

I think it’s a great pity that Apple TV seems to be on a road to nowhere. Although new movies regularly appear, the top TV rentals have barely changed in six months, bar new content from the BBC showing up on a regular basis (which makes no odds to me, being British, but I’m sure Americans are happy about this, so: well done, BBC). And it’s bizarre that studio execs witter on about Apple TV ‘devaluing’ content when that same content is available in the US in unlimited form for under $10 per month from Netflix.

Give me the last season of House on Apple TV for rent. I’ll watch the lot and you’ll get money. Chuck, too. And probably a whole bunch of other shows. Alternatively, sit there stamping your little feet, covering your ears, shutting your eyes and pretending it’s still 1999. That’s all fine. Bitch and moan about how Apple somehow ‘destroyed’ the music industry (by convincing a bunch of people to pay for digital) and how you don’t want the same to happen to the world of TV. I’ll keep pretending it’s 1999, too, by waiting until the shows I want to watch are in the bargain bin (which happens increasingly quickly these days), and you’ll get less money—and it’s your own damn fault, you idiots.

Previously on Patent Trolling America:

Indie developers get hit by threats from company that makes a living suing people over wide-ranging patents.

Lodsys goes wah wah wah on a blog, suggesting they are the victims here. I disagree (and, judging by the fact my article from yesterday rocketed to second place in Revert to Saved’s all-time most-read list, I’m not the only one).

Today, the guy who first revealed he’d been hit by Lodsys, James Thomson, said another wave of attacks is happening:

Sounds like there’s a second wave of FedEx parcels today – the Iconfactory just got one.

This one’s going to run and run unless someone fights and wins, or Apple smashes Lodsys in its stupid face with a lawyer-shaped punch.

Two points people have been making about Lodsys are worth countering.

1. They only want 0.575% of US income from IAP, so why all the whining?

The figure might not seem much, but what’s to stop Lodsys amending this later? Or for some other party to say it has a patent that IAP infringes and demand 1% or 2%? And then for another to do the same? Before you know it, half your income is paying patent trolls and Apple’s platform gradually becomes deserted by the developers who made it a success.

Also, importantly, this figure is apparently not included in the documents being sent out by Lodsys. It’s all very well to say “but we’re not asking for much” after you’ve already scared the shit out of a bunch of developers. (Most can now, of course, find the information online, but they shouldn’t have to, and the many developers who received the letter on Friday probably spent the weekend wondering how much Lodsys would damage their business.)

It’s also still unclear whether paying Lodsys would breach the terms developers sign with Apple, meaning IAP in itself would be possible until some kind of global resolution is made, such as Apple amending its terms accordingly. (And that would surely open the floodgates to infinite trolling idiots on money rafts.)

2. Lodsys says Apple is licensed, so it’s not going to fight, and it’s only fair the devs get permission to use the technology too.

First, Apple provides no alternative to IAP, so devs cannot avoid it unless they ditch any app with this capability. Secondly, I don’t for a second imagine Apple legal thought problems like this would ever occur, and that it’d roll out a system that would eventually incur extra costs for iOS developers. Development platforms are supposed to be utterly bulletproof-safe to develop for. You shouldn’t have to think “I wonder whether some scumbag will sue me for using IAP at some point”—this should all be covered; developers should be protected by the company that owns the platform or service.

Should Apple capitulate here, expect—again—a ton more threats of this kind to appear, resulting in developer income being chipped away piece by piece. Given Apple’s rather powerful legal team, I’ll be astonished if it sits back and does nothing whatsoever.