Most of the techie portion of the internet is talking about the iPad 3, after the usual rumour sites starting posting components of what might or might not be bits of the next Apple tablet. One of the most common rumours is that the next-gen device will get itself a Retina display, and Wired today started talking about the apps Apple should demo.

In the context of the iPhone and iPod touch, a Retina display means a display where it is—for people with standard eyesight—more or less impossible to resolve single pixels on the screen. Instead of jagged text and graphics, the 326ppi screen provides print-like imagery. By contrast, the current iPad is 132ppi—better than most computer displays, but lacking when directly compared to current iPhones and iPods. With the next iPad, the hope is that Apple would up the resolution to 2048-by-1536, and while this wouldn’t have the same pin-sharp qualities as the iPhone and iPod, it would nonetheless be tricky to resolve individual pixels unless holding the iPad closer than is sensible and comfortable. So no playing Sniff the Angry Birds for you, if you want to keep that illusion of smoothness in the graphics.

But here’s the thing: 2048-by-1536 is a massive display size. It’s bigger than 1080p (used by the 21.5-inch iMac) and wouldn’t even fit on the display of a 27-inch iMac. Think about that for a moment: a 1:1 recreation of an iPad Retina display would not fit on the largest display Apple currently ships. But said display is driven by a powerful computer, not a svelte tablet that doesn’t have the graphics grunt of a Mac or PC.

I’m quietly hopeful that Apple has some kind of genius/magic/pixie dust and will reveal an iPad 3 with a Retina display within the next two months. But this is dependent on various factors: the screen actually being of a high enough quality and possible to manufacture quickly enough in large numbers; such a display not adversely affecting performance (after all, it will require some serious GPU clout); battery life remaining very close to the existing seven-to-ten hours you can get from reasonably careful usage. Apple is not a company for bullet points—it leaves out technology if the rest of the device would be compromised. We’ve seen this in the iPhone with 3G on the original model and now with 4G. There’s every chance we could see the same on the iPad, which could end up with a rather more conservative refresh, along the lines of the iPhone 4S (perhaps getting a RAM and speed bump, Siri, and a better camera).

I’m sure if this happens, most of the tech press will use this as proof once again that Apple is doomed, Tim Cook is some kind of blundering fool who should immediately be fired, and that Android tablets will soon grab 99.9 per cent of the tablet market. Me, I think that an iPad 2S would sell like hot cakes, and that Apple should only bring in cutting-edge technology when it’s ready. If that happens to be this spring, great; if not, I’m more than happy to wait.

From a Guardian article on Twitter Joke Trial:

The utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer says we should welcome the exponential increase in the possibilities for surveillance. If others know more about us, we know more about them. We will move to a free and open society. We will be less ashamed of our secrets and less censorious of our neighbours. Disclosure will bring the greatest happiness to the greatest number.

That or people will tend to lie even more than they do now.

Late last year, I wrote about the increasingly absurd nature of IAP (in-app purchase) on iOS. The subject was Hipstamatic Disposable, which offered a bizarre pricing model that made you buy new and shiny virtual digital film for your new and shiny virtual digital film camera. I joked that we’d soon see driving games were you had to fill up your car with fuel, matching prices to the real world, just to enhance the realism. Several devs responded on Twitter, with at least some degree of seriousness, that I shouldn’t be giving certain publishers ideas.

The thing is, I’m not against IAP entirely, since it can be used for good. For example, it’s a great way to offer new content, or a ‘demo’ of a game that can be unlocked once you complete a few levels; it’s also a means to enable gamers to skip ahead through buying extras (i.e. cheats), which is fair enough if your difficulty curve is well-defined. The problem is that too many companies are now using IAP to gouge customers; they look at the top-grossing charts and see grind games performing well and therefore implement grind-or-pay mechanisms of their own. The vicious cycle continues, even infecting classic games like Tetris.

If you’ve not yet played it, the new Tetris for iPhone and iPod has the most astonishingly bat-shit crazy IAP possible. The sad thing is the game itself is, in my opinion, really good. You get a standard sub-optimal swipe mode, but also a new one-touch version that retains the game’s strategy but works well with the touchscreen. Additionally, there’s a compelling level-based puzzle mode that has you blast your way to the bottom of piles of junk. I’ve not had so much fun with a Tetris game since the version released for the original Game Boy.

But EA had to weld IAP to the game and ruin things. The puzzle mode has power-ups and these are paid for using T-Coins. You can either get T-Coins by grinding away scoring in the main mode, or by paying cold, hard cash. 200,000 T-Coins? A snip at $99.99! That’s a $99.99 IAP. For Tetris. Or you could ‘just’ pay $29.99 for a 12-month T-Club subscription, which earns you 15 per cent more T-Coins with every game! That’s right: for just 43 times more than the game itself costs, you can get a slight speed bump to how fast you acquire coins to spend elsewhere in the game. Of course, you don’t have to pay, but without doing so, you’re effectively screwed in the puzzle mode when it comes to decent scores and ratings (which is essentially what any iOS puzzler is about).

This is hateful, but it’s becoming all too common in the iOS gaming world. We now see freemium sports games that demand you pay for more ‘energy’ that is otherwise replenished at a painfully slow rate. And similar mechanics are evident in other genres, too. To my mind, this is the greatest threat to iOS gaming, which could become known not for great games, but for the fact it costs tens of dollars to buy yourself a right to play a bit of a game, but only for a set (and short) period of time, regardless of your level of skill and investment to that point.

I’m really not sure what the solution is. I’d started off thinking about 1980s arcades, which rewarded skill, in the sense that you still paid per play, but the better you got, the longer you stayed on the machine. The thing is, such ‘hardcore’ mechanics would alienate many contemporary gamers, who don’t expect to be booted off a game for not having perfect reflexes. But ‘pay for a slice of time’ in a more general sense feels even more like a corruption of gaming’s purity. Perhaps it’s a sign of the times and of my age. Music continues a move towards a subscription model, with you paying monthly for as much music as you can take in, rather than owning a more limited number of albums forever; television and movies, too, increasingly drift towards such models. But I still fear for gaming when instead of you paying a sum of money upfront for a finite slice of entertainment, you’re instead presented with absurd difficulty curves or arbitrary limitations that can only be overcome by delving into your wallet. And even then, you’ll be expected to delve at regular intervals.

I hope this is just a blip. I hope that the efforts of indies such as Zach Gage and Jeff Minter, both of which offer fantastic iOS games for set prices, encourage other developers to take this path, rather than gouging. But every month I see more developers dipping a toe into the freemium waters, under the guise of ‘social gaming’ or ‘value’, when what they’re really doing is hoping our wallets will chunder coin vomits into their banking toilets.

I wrote about the recent Path cock-up for .net earlier this week. The short version is that a dev was making a Path client for OS X and realised the iOS app was uploading his entire address book to Path’s servers. Path has since nuked all data it took and made the process opt-in, although the CEO had previously argued:

This is currently the industry best practice and the App Store guidelines do not specifically discuss contact information.

Since then, it’s been discovered that uploading your contacts isn’t an uncommon practice, and this led UI designer Dustin Curtis to say:

I fully believe this issue is a failure of Apple and a breach of trust by Apple, not by app developers. The expectation of Address Book privacy is obvious; in fact, one person on Hacker News, in response to learning about Path’s use of the data, said, “Apple would never do this to their users.” Because Apple has your trust and yet gives this private information freely to developers, Apple does do this to their users. All of them.

I find this argument outrageous. Apple’s terms state:

17.1: Apps cannot transmit data about a user without obtaining the user’s prior permission and providing the user with access to information about how and where the data will be used

17.2: Apps that require users to share personal information, such as email address and date of birth, in order to function will be rejected

But more to the point, why should Apple become a watchdog for the less-than-moral behaviour of some developers? Just because you can do something, that doesn’t mean you should. And if your app is grabbing and uploading personal data, you should figure out whether this is absolutely necessary, and also decide on how you’re going to inform the user that this is happening. It isn’t Apple’s job to stop you or make the decision about how you handle such data—that’s your job as a trustworthy developer.

Update: Ben Brooks disagrees:

If you live and play in the Apple world, you need only trust Apple. This is what Apple tells us — it’s a ‘feature’ of the Apple ecosystem.

The fact is, that in this instance, Apple broke that trust.

I’m not sure what the alternative is. No access to the data? Access only on opt-in (which people tap anyway, regardless and without thinking, and that drives admins bonkers)? But my point stands that Curtis’s argument that this is all down to Apple and not down to devs, despite the existing Apple terms, is hogwash.

I last week wrote about Atari and Zynga showcasing imbalance in the iOS games industry. The main thrust of the argument was that in cases of a developer being inspired by an existing product, they were leaving themselves open to attack if small, but would be unaffected by the opposition (bar, possibly, some negative PR) if big. The two examples were:

• Atari forcing Vector Tanks games off of the App Store, due to the indie games borrowing fairly heavily from Atari’s Battlezone.
• Zynga’s Dream Heights looking perilously close to indie dev NimbleBit’s Tiny Towers.

GamesBeat now has a response from Zynga CEO Mark Pincus about the second of those spats:

We think there is a massive body of work in the video game industry that is going to be reimagined for decades to come in a way that is free, accessible and social. That’s what we’re doing. I don’t think anyone should be surprised when they see us come out with games that they’ve seen before, a decade or more ago. I don’t think there are a lot of totally new games that are invented. We always try. But to us, they are like the crew mechanic in our games. They give you a new way to interact with your friends.

To be fair to Pincus, I don’t have a problem with this argument. Even many of the games you think were amazingly original when they appeared at the dawn of the industry were effectively clones, or at least based heavily on existing games. Defender? Space Invaders, flipped on its side, with scrolling and a dash of Asteroids—and that’s a compressed version of the description I got directly from the game’s creator during a phone interview for Retro Gamer, not my own take on things.

However, what Pincus doesn’t address (and nor would I expect him to) is that this approach is only fine today if you are a company like Zynga, backed by an army of lawyers and a pile of cash. He’s essentially using the same excuse as the Vector Tanks devs—that it’s fine to take an existing gaming idea and put your own spin on it to add further value. But it isn’t nearly a level playing field, and indies are the ones hit by the fallout, whether they’re the ones providing inspiration (and cannot afford to battle huge companies inspired by their games) or drawing from existing gaming properties (and cannot afford to defend when a large company has their game removed from sale).

Hat-tip: The Appside.

Further reading: NimbleBit responds on TouchArcade regarding just how close Tiny Towers and Dream Heights are—clearly in the same ballpark as Battlezone and the original Vector Tanks.