Speaking of (not) starting with the user...

Speaking of (not) starting with the user…

In related topics, it occurred to me that Sony has had a similar problem for seemingly forever. They brag about megaflops or whatever, and expect someone else to do all the work. What exactly is supposed to get me excited about playing PS4? Will it have Mario Kart? How about Final Fantasy? Oh, really–when?

But this is such an old trope in video games, that there’s even a pithy trusim for it: It’s the software, stupid.

The ‘software’ in this expression is not meant to be the sort that runs on a headless Linux server somewhere, dumping logs into a text-based console; instead, it refers to the kind of software that people actually use.

App.net continues in the same direction: backwards

Marco:

Very few developers need App.net to add features or APIs, and I just don’t see a lot of demand for the new APIs and theoretical use-cases that they’re now pushing.

You know what developers are good at? Developing. You know what they don’t need? Yet another freakin’ API. If they needed an API, they could find one or make one. The available options for doing these things have never been easier or better.

The original idea behind App.net seemed to be this: Let’s build an infrastructure that’s so good, developers will want to build all kinds of amazing products on top of it!

Engineers are fascinated by infrastructure. Engineers love being creative by building new and clever types of infrastructure. As an engineer, it’s easy to get so wrapped up in the fascinating details of the infrastructure you’re building that you forget what the ultimate goal of it should be:

The user.

If there’s no-one to use your infrastructure, there’s no point.

That’s why you always start with the user. How can I delight the user? How can I make the user’s life better? You build an app around that, then (and only then), if necessary, you build an infrastructure around that app. The user is in the centre, and everything else is designed around supporting the user. You couldn’t possibly get the right design for everything else if you don’t even know who the user is!

App.net started with the infrastructure instead of the user. They didn’t answer these questions. They still haven’t.

iTunes and quality control problems

As loath as I am to link to Business Insider, Henry Blodget shares this interesting anecdote, as an email he received from Amazon:

Hello,

We noticed that you experienced poor video playback while watching the following rental(s) on Amazon Video On Demand:

Casablanca

We’re sorry for the inconvenience and have issued you a refund for the following amount(s):

$2.99

…We hope to see you again soon.

Amazon Video On Demand Team

The customer had a minor problem with his purchase, Amazon noticed, Amazon made it right - all without the customer ever saying a word. That’s impressive.

---

This made me think about my experiences with the iTunes Store.

1. Doctor Who, Season 1 (2005)

I purchased this a year or two ago, after noticing that the Netflix version of it had been inexplicably converted to 4:3 pan-scan (despite it originally having aired on the BBC in 16:9).

The iTunes version was in the correct aspect ratio, but the video quality was absolutely abysmal. Based on the amount of visible compression artefacts and pixellation, it looked like it had been nearest-neighbour resized and converted from some kind of awful 1990s codec¹. I can only imagine that this is the result of someone at BBC America thinking something along the lines of ‘all web video is the same’.

I requested a refund through iTunes Support, and received it, along with a form letter reminding me that this was an exception to the rules and they didn’t have to do this for me because ‘all sales are final’. How incredibly generous of them.

The purchase has since disappeared from my iCloud library. I would like to own this season, if they ever fix the quality issues, but I have no way of knowing if or when that will ever happen, or if it has already happened.

2. The Dark Knight

I purchased this a few weeks ago in anticipation of the new one coming out soon. Overall it was fine, but during the ‘bat sonar’ scenes, the aspect ratio kept switching back and forth to 16:9, even though the rest of the film was presented in 2.40:1.²

I didn’t consider this enough of a problem to contact support, but it seems like a clumsy oversight, and it makes me wonder how this could even happen.

3. The Lord of the Rings - Extended Edition Bundle

I haven’t actually purchased this one yet, but I was thinking about it - until I saw the reviews.

Apparently, Fellowship is missing the subtitles in the spoken Elvish scenes, making it impossible to know what the characters are saying, unless you’re a much bigger Tolkien nerd than I am.

As for Two Towers and RotK, reviews report that the soundtrack is in mono - even in the ‘HD’ versions.³ And this is supposed to be a premium offering? It’s priced to suggest as much.

Again, I have no way to know if or when these problems are ever corrected, and whether it is ‘safe’ to buy these now. Many reviews that still show up on the top of the page complain that there is no HD version, when in fact this has since been rectified. But I can easily confirm the existence of an HD version by looking at the store page; the same can’t be said for video and audio problems.

Edit 12/22: Here is a long forum thread about these problems. It appears the mono problems may have been resolved, at least for some people, but if you read through it all, you can see what an awful mess it was to get through to someone who could do something about it. The subtitles problem is mentioned on page #6. Going by that, as well as reviews that are still coming in from the past few days, it looks like the subtitles problem still exists and nobody is doing anything about it.

---

As soon as Apple announced both TV shows and movie purchases would be available for streaming in iCloud, I decided that all of my future purchases would be through them instead of in the form of physical objects. I am totally on board with this cloud-based future: the instant gratification of watching purchases immediately, the ability to access my entire collection from anywhere, nothing to take up space on my shelves or hard drives, etc. I am so enthusiastic about this that I am willing to overlook the serious flaws, like DRM (which only hurts paying customers, not pirates) and the possibility that if Apple ever discontinues the service, I could ‘lose’ everything⁴.

I have not made very many purchases to date: only a small handful, which makes these problems seem like an overall, systematic quality-control issue. It’s possible I’m just unlucky, but these are some fairly well-known titles.

Who’s to blame for this?

As an iOS developer, I’m somewhat familiar with iTunes Connect, the web site that developers use to submit apps to the App Store. It has ‘iTunes’ in the name because it was originally created for record labels to upload music to the iTunes Store, which predates either apps or movies being available for sale.

I think it’s fair to assume that movie distribution works the same way: the publisher applies for an iTunes Connect account, Apple creates the account, then the publisher does the rest. The publisher uses the web site to create movies in the database, fills in the textual and promotional information, encodes the video files according to Apple’s guidelines, then uploads them. It wouldn’t surprise me if Apple doesn’t even review these videos before making them available for sale, like they do for apps; there are only a small handful of very big companies that publish movies, and they necessarily have close business relationships with Apple (due to the negotiations that must take place), unlike app developers.

For whatever reason, it seems like the publishers, who are encoding the videos and doing such a poor job of it, are just not putting as much effort behind their iTunes versions of the movies as the DVDs and Blu-rays. I’m guessing at the executive level, they still see iTunes as just some annoying short-lived fad, and if people really want movies they know they should be buying Blu-rays, and people will continue to buy Blu-rays forever because that’s what Hollywood told them to do; and that they therefore don’t allocate as many talented engineers and quality-control people to the department responsible for encoding the iTunes versions, versus the Blu-ray and DVD versions.

---

It’s unrealistic to expect meaningful change or awareness from Hollywood. They’re too big and stupid. Apple has to solve this problem.

It’s really quite simple: when a bunch of people report the same problem to support, have someone from Apple look at the video and observe the problem. If Apple can confirm it, pull the video from sale, and tell the publisher it doesn’t get to go back on sale until it’s fixed. That should light a fire under them. Sound familiar? It’s pretty much what already happens on the App Store.

Then, to go a step further, when the publisher fixes the problem and Apple confirms it, and it goes back on sale: email everyone who purchased it (whether or not they have already been refunded) to apologise and let them know the problem has been fixed. And if there are any public reviews mentioning the problem, add a response that indicates it has been resolved. (For the love of all that is decent, don’t just simply delete the reviews! That makes it look like you’re trying to hide the problem rather than solve it.)

Notice that my plan doesn’t even involve refunding the affected people. I don’t think that’s strictly necessary, although it would make customers happier and I certainly think Apple could afford to do it. But personally, I’m less concerned about getting my money back (or a ‘free’ movie) as I am about actually watching and enjoying the thing I wanted to watch.

Anyway, nothing will change until someone high up at Apple understands that this is a problem, and I’m not sure they do.

---

1. I’m not the kind of person who usually notices these things. I happily watch DVDs on my HDTV. I don’t own a single Blu-ray. If it was bad enough for me to notice, then it was quite bad. ↩︎

2. 16:9 is the aspect ratio of ‘widescreen’ HDTVs, which is not the same shape as the screen in a cinema - those are 2.40:1, which is even wider. That’s why many ‘widescreen’ movies you watch on your HDTV still have black bars at the top and bottom, even though both the movie and the TV are supposed to be ‘widescreen’ - they’re different types of ‘widescreen’. Other movies are either made in 16:9 to fit your TV at the expense of looking good in the cinema, or are made in 2.40:1 and then the edges are clipped off to fit your TV - just like the bad old days before HDTVs. TV shows are almost always made in 16:9 these days. The TV industry had a chance to fix this aspect ratio nonsense once and for all when HDTVs started becoming popular a few years ago, but they chose not to, and why that is remains a mystery to me. But then, so are a lot of things the TV industry does, like keeping around interlacing and overscan. ↩︎

3. For a while, I was puzzled as to how the people leaving reviews could be so certain that this was the case, as opposed to some other kind of audio problem - do they all have exceptional hearing ability? Then I remembered that some high-end sound systems actually have LED lights indicating what type of audio signal they’re receiving (e.g.: DTS, 5.1, stereo, or indeed, mono). Or, I suppose, you could download the film to your Mac, open it in QuickTime and do a Get Info. ↩︎

4. Scare quotes because nothing is ever really ‘lost’ on the internet. The movies will still exist somewhere. I am throwing Hollywood a bone here and making a conscious effort to play by their rules. In return, I expect them to not screw me over. If they do, I’m sure I’ll find some way to make my media collection whole again; but I would prefer it if it didn’t come to that. This is the tenuous arrangement I am making with them: they have this one chance to make this work right and have me as a paying customer, and it’s up to them now, as to whether they’re going to keep a good thing going, or ruin it somehow. ↩︎

In-app web views

Gruber on Gmail 2.0:

It’s nice to have a built-in webview for previewing links without leaving the app. Apple Mail feels out of date in this regard — always jumping you over to Safari to open links made sense in 2007. It feels outdated in the App Store world of today, where everyone is used to web pages opening in an in-app webview in just about every app that contains links.

I hate these, and I’m surprised to see Gruber say this. I turn them off whenever I can, and am constantly frustrated by apps that don’t allow me to turn them off (Reeder, in particular).

The problem is consistency (or lack thereof): every app has its own idea about what a web browser should be, and what features it should have. It destroys muscle memory, and it’s annoying when I try to use a feature of Safari that isn’t there or works differently.

I’ve always thought of in-app web views as an annoying holdover from before iOS had multitasking or fast app switching (which was a long time ago)–just one of those things that keeps on going due to inertia, long after the original purpose of its existence is gone.

Moreover, accepting the non-standard trend of showing all web pages inside an app, instead of ever sending them out to Safari where they belong, is an admission of the failure of iOS’s app-switching functionality. I’m further surprised that Gruber doesn’t see this as more of a problem. Personally, I think there is much room for improvement, but a double-push of the home button followed by a single tap in the bottom left of the screen is still preferable to me over a messy, inconsistent experience. I guess I’ve just gotten used to going through these motions, cumbersome though they are. I never could get used to wildly differing UIs for the same thing. Again: muscle memory.

Apple should do one of two things:

1. Create a standard way for apps to show a ‘Safari sheet’ that has not only the content of a web page, but all of the features and standard UI controls of the Safari app, with the same on-screen placement as the Safari app. (Kind of like the Mail composing sheet you see everywhere.)
2. Fix app switching, so that more people are willing (or able) to use it, and developers don’t feel the need to keep building these ugly hacks.

Until then, I’m going to keep grumbling every time I have to do several extra taps for ‘Open in Safari’.

How to use an iPhone with a prepaid plan (in the US)

1. AT&T GoPhone
2. T-Mobile Monthly4G
3. Virgin Mobile
4. StraightTalk and other MVNOs

AT&T GoPhone

GoPhone is how AT&T brands their prepaid service.

Why you’d want this

If you have somehow obtained an AT&T or unlocked iPhone which is off-contract, you may want to use it without signing a contract. As of current writing, AT&T has a surprisingly inexpensive prepaid plan for smartphones:

$25/month for 250 minutes and unlimited texts + $25/month for 1 GB data = $50/month total

That’s less than even their cheapest and most useless on-contract plan, and you can cancel or switch to someone else at any time. It’s not rocket science.

More about this plan here. Note that the $50 ‘unlimited data’ plan is NOT for smartphones like the iPhone. Typical AT&T - they’ll sell you ‘unlimited’ only if your phone can’t do anything with it. As for voice plans, you can only buy data if you have at least the $25 voice plan, so forget about trying to go cheaper there. You could buy a smaller amount of data, but the next step down is 200 MB for $15, which hardly seems like enough for anyone. There is apparently no tier higher than 1 GB, but if you use up the 1 GB, you should be able to pay $25 again for another 1 GB (I haven’t tested this).

What to know beforehand

AT&T hates you.

Officially, this plan is not available for iPhones, because AT&T are jerks and they want you to sign a contract. If you ask anyone at AT&T about it directly, they are likely to tell you this, as it’s the party line and they could get in trouble for saying otherwise. You can, however, get it to work (see below).

You will not have Visual Voicemail. If you tap Voicemail in the Phone app, it will dial into the voice-prompting robot, and you’ll be able to use it just like your old dumbphone. It will also correctly indicate how many voicemails are waiting for you.

MMS also reportedly may not work. I haven’t tested this myself, because I don’t care about MMS.

All other features of the phone, including voice, text, internet and iMessage, should work.

If you have a 4S or a 5, you will have access to AT&T’s fastest 3G (which they sometimes refer to as ‘4G’). You will not have access to LTE because currently, GoPhone is completely excluded from LTE. This may change in the future. This was a business decision by AT&T; there is no technical reason for it.

A bit of background

Technically, there’s no reason for GoPhone data not to work, even on a locked iPhone, except for one important detail: APN settings.

GSM, the technology that AT&T and T-Mobile (in the US) use, was designed to be brilliantly simple: get any SIM card from a carrier, put it in any GSM phone, and it just works. No setup. No configuration.

Except when data came along, they had to go and screw that up with APN settings. No longer is it enough to just put in a SIM card; that will still get you instant voice and text service, but for data, you need to manually type in a bunch of settings.

Obviously, this is not the Apple way. So Apple has made APN settings for all of their official carriers built-in to iOS. But here’s the thing about AT&T: they require different APN settings for their postpaid customers, vs. their prepaid customers.¹ And since prepaid AT&T isn’t officially supported, the iPhone will automatically use the postpaid APN settings, resulting in no data for you, even if you buy the prepaid data plan.

Well then. Easy fix, right? Just change the APN settings.

Nope. If your iPhone is locked, you have no way to manually edit the APN settings. (If your iPhone is unlocked, these settings magically appear. Unless you put an AT&T SIM card in there, in which case they disappear again, even on an unlocked phone. Why? Because AT&T hates you, that’s why.)

Luckily, there is a workaround, which is only intended for system administrators at large corporations, but anyone with the right knowledge can use it: configuration profiles. Basically, you just type the APN settings into a specially-formatted data file, and load it onto the iPhone; it will obey the settings in this file, even if it’s a locked phone and you can’t otherwise edit them. This is not hacking; it is a legitimate feature of iOS that Apple provides and has continued to provide, and it survives iOS updates etc.

The most well-known site for finding pre-made configuration profiles is unlockit.co.nz, which has profiles for almost every known carrier. If you visit that site on an iPhone, it offers you the ability to download and install them.

How to do it

Caveat: if you’re trying to do this with an iPhone 5, it probably won’t work because (as of writing) AT&T does not have GoPhone nano-SIM cards. They do have GoPhone mini-SIMs (for 3GS and earlier) and micro-SIMs (for 4 and 4S).

Update 2012-11-30: Now that Apple is selling unlocked iPhone 5, I can confirm that this does indeed still work. The AT&T staffer was happy to move my GoPhone service over to a nano-SIM for me (and even happier when I told him about unlockit.co.nz, which he did not know about). Contrary to what I previously said, I now believe there is no such thing as a ‘prepaid’ or a ‘postpaid’ SIM card at AT&T - it seems like any SIM card can be used for anything, the staffer just has to activate it the right way for you.

1. If you have any data on the iPhone, back it up now using iTunes or iCloud. Then erase the entire phone. (The specific steps for this are outside the scope of this how-to. Search Apple’s support site if you need help.)
2. Go to an AT&T store. I suggest an official one, not an authorised reseller - they’re more likely to have a clue.
3. Tell them you want the $25 GoPhone voice plan. If they give you trouble about activating it for an iPhone, just tell them that you understand that data won’t work, that you don’t care about data, and that you will only be using the iPhone on Wi-Fi.
4. Follow the AT&T agent’s directions in order to activate the iPhone while you are in the store. Make sure it works by placing a test call.
5. If you previously backed up your iPhone, you can restore it now.
6. From the comfort of your home, use a computer to log in to AT&T’s prepaid web site: paygonline.com. Unless the AT&T agent gave you a PIN, you will need to use ‘forgot password’ the first time in order to log in.
7. Add the $25 data plan to your account. (If you are worried about whether it will work, you can add a smaller amount of data to test it first.)
8. Using your iPhone (connected to your home Wi-Fi), open Safari and go to: unlockit.co.nz
9. Choose ‘Create APN’ on the web site, and select GoPhone for the carrier.
10. Follow the prompts to install the configuration profile.
11. Power your phone all the way off by holding the power button on the top, then slide the control. Update: No need to power off, just go into Settings > General > Mobile Data, and toggle it off and on again.

You should now have voice, text and data fully working.

T-Mobile Monthly4G

First of all, when T-Mobile says ‘4G’, they mean what the rest of us know as 3G. Got it? It doesn’t have to make sense. Just go with it.

Why you’d want this

T-Mobile loves you. (Given their financials, they’re also pretty desperate right now.) They will bend over backwards to have you and your iPhone as a customer–postpaid or prepaid. They have the most inexpensive plans of anyone, including one for $30 with 100 minutes, unlimited texts, and 5 GB data². Even though they don’t sell iPhones and aren’t an Apple-approved carrier, their staff are specially trained on how to activate iPhones on their network.

A quick detour about unlocking

Your iPhone needs to be unlocked in order to work with T-Mobile.

In general, the iPhone is unlocked only if it was purchased from Apple at full price, or the carrier has granted an unlock. AT&T will unlock an iPhone only after the 2-year contract has been completed, and _only for the original owner of the phone_³. So if someone is giving you a phone, get them to unlock it first, if possible; if someone is selling you a phone, be very suspicious.

Serendipitously, all Verizon iPhone 5’s come unlocked out of the box–more info about this here–but see the important caveat about LTE below.

This section about unlocking could easily turn into an entire article, so I’m not going to say any more about it–search for more elsewhere if you need to.

What to know beforehand

The reason not to go with T-Mobile is that their 3G network has historically been incompatible with the iPhone’s 3G, which means you’d be limited to the slower EDGE/2G speed (similar to dialup, if anyone still remembers what that is).

The good news is that T-Mobile is ‘refarming’ its 3G network to be compatible with all iPhones by the end of 2012, so if they are to be believed, it will no longer be an issue after that. You can check the status of this effort on this unofficial web site here.

However, as of writing, T-Mobile currently has no LTE network at all. Moreover, only the AT&T model iPhone 5 is compatible with T-Mobile’s planned LTE frequencies; the Verizon (or Sprint, if you can somehow unlock it) iPhone 5 will work on T-Mobile 3G, but not LTE. If LTE isn’t that important to you right now, read on.

Like with GoPhone, you will not have Visual Voicemail. MMS might work; I haven’t tested it.

How to do it

If you have an iPhone 3GS or earlier, order this SIM card and activate it on the web when it arrives.

If you have an iPhone 4 or 4S, you need a micro-SIM, which isn’t available online. Update: These are now available online too!

If you have an iPhone 5 (lucky you!), you need a nano-SIM card, which isn’t currently available anywhere. Update: They do have these in official T-Mobile stores now, but the store I went to refused to give me a SIM unless I activated it on the spot, which I wasn’t interested in doing. This might not be a problem for you, unless you want the $30 web-only plan, in which case… good luck arguing with the retail staff about it, because I wasn’t able to find any nano-SIMs on the web site.⁴ You can also try mutilating a larger SIM to fit in the iPhone 5, but I wouldn’t recommend it because not only are the dimensions wrong, but a micro-SIM is too thick - you’d need to file it down with sandpaper - and if you don’t get it precisely right, you risk damaging your phone.

No need for me to waste more words explaining how to set it up, because T-Mobile has a detailed guide right here. Like I said, they’d love to have you, unlike AT&T.

Aren’t you glad that merger didn’t work out? A competitive marketplace for all! (As if.)

Virgin Mobile

I have only this to say about Virgin Mobile: you pay the full, unlocked price⁵ for a locked phone, and they will never ever unlock it for you, for any reason.

Their service prices are about the same as T-Mobile. If you’re considering Virgin Mobile, just buy an unlocked phone directly from Apple and activate it with T-Mobile.

Virgin Mobile’s network is certainly no advantage: they don’t have one. They use the spotty Sprint network, but at least postpaid Sprint customers can roam onto Verizon’s network at no extra charge when the signal drops; Virgin Mobile customers are not allowed to roam at all, so when it drops, it just drops.

I used a Virgin Mobile MiFi (3G data device) for about two years, and the network was pretty terrible most of the time (Boston area). And they kept screwing around with the prices and terms the entire time.

If for some reason you’re still convinced that Virgin Mobile is the way to go, you don’t need any ‘how to’ information from me–just go ahead and buy the phone from them, since they won’t accept any phone onto their network except one they sold you directly.

StraightTalk and other MVNOs

StraightTalk (a Mobile Virtual Network Operator, or MVNO) has become somewhat popular with prepaid iPhone customers because of their $45 unlimited plan (where ‘unlimited’ means 2 GB of data).

The nice thing about StraightTalk is that they operate on AT&T’s network, so the SIM cards even appear to the phone as if they were AT&T SIM cards - hence, you can even use it with a locked AT&T iPhone.

The main problem with StraightTalk is their customer service. If you go to HowardForums (my source for almost everything I know on this topic), you’ll see many tales of woe. Basically, if it works, it works fine; if anything goes wrong, good luck getting it fixed, because they will blame you, give you wrong information, and generally be completely unhelpful. Personally, I wouldn’t want to risk porting my number to them and possibly never getting it back, unless I had no other choice.

There are a bunch of other, smaller MVNOs as well. You can find them by searching, or looking around at HowardForums. If you don’t mind putting the time to research and experiment into it, they’re out there.

---

1. Other carriers, such as T-Mobile, do not do this; all of their customers use the same APN settings. One reason that AT&T likely does this is to segregate prepaid customers onto a separate section of their network, so as to give postpaid customers priority in the event of any clogged tubes. That’s right, move over to make room for the real customers, you prepaid moochers. Incidentally, if you’ve read the section about MVNOs, they are even lower down on the AT&T food chain than AT&T prepaid customers. ↩︎

2. T-Mobile refers to almost all of their data plans as ‘unlimited’, because you don’t get cut off or charged more after you hit the limit (in this case 5 GB), it just slows down to sub-3G speeds. But it is, in no uncertain terms, limited. This deceptive marketing is the one thing I hate about T-Mobile right now. ↩︎

3. I know there is a ‘non-customer’ option on that page. I’ve tried it. When you select that option, they demand the original sales receipt for the phone. Good luck. ↩︎

4. Here’s what I would suggest trying: order a micro-SIM online, activate it without porting your number, and sign up for the $30 plan that isn’t available in stores. Then bring the micro-SIM into a store and tell them you already have service and just want it transferred onto a nano-SIM. This will probably look pretty weird considering you never even put the micro-SIM in an actual phone. Only after you know this works in your iPhone 5, port your old number over (to avoid losing it if something goes wrong) - most carriers can do a port even after the new service is already active. Note, this is entirely speculative, I have not tried this and have no idea if it would really work! ↩︎

5. Or more than full price: Virgin Mobile currently sells both the iPhone 4 and 4S for $100 more than the unlocked price from Apple. (They don’t have the 5 yet.) For shame. ↩︎

Goodbye, Virgin Mobile

At the risk of showboating a bit, I ended my 8+ year customer relationship with Virgin Mobile the other day. I can’t think of any other company that I’ve continually paid a recurring service fee to for that long. I’ve never used anyone else for cell phone service. I’ve never had a cell phone contract, and with any luck, I never will.

I signed up during my freshman year in college¹, with their cheapest phone, a Kyocera K7 Rave. I remember it because of the cool name. It glowed blue, and was generally a piece of junk, but to me it was an amazing novelty. The number pad fell off after three years or so (remember when it was normal to keep a cell phone for that long?).

Until last week, I was still grandfathered into the $0.18/minute plan that hasn’t been offered for quite a long time.² All I had to do was add at least $20 every 3 months to keep my line active, and considering how little I talk on the phone (and the fact that I make most calls from my cheap VoIP line when I’m home), I almost never paid more than the minimum, which meant I paid about $7/month for cell phone service. I used to love telling people that and seeing their reactions.

I’ve had no real complaints about the voice service. I was rarely anywhere that I can remember not having a signal. Not many missed calls after the first year or two.

But things have changed. The world has changed. I wanted an iPhone since it first came out, but I couldn’t stand the idea of a contract, even if broke-college-student-me could have afforded one. So I got an iPod Touch as soon as I could. I loved it.

Then I decided I wanted to make iPhone apps. So I did, and I got a job making them. And it began to get more and more ridiculous that I, an iPhone developer, didn’t have an iPhone. I was still stuck with a beat-up old flip-phone that could only make phone calls, an iPod Touch, an iPad, and a Virgin Mobile MiFi that was so buggy and temperamental that it couldn’t even power itself on properly half the time.

I was certainly paying attention when Virgin Mobile announced they would carry the iPhone. But I soon found out that they would be locking the SIM slot, with a policy of not unlocking it under any circumstances. That doesn’t sit well with me. If they felt like subsidising the phone gives them the right to tell me what I can or can’t do with it, fine. But if I pay full price–which is what they’re charging–that should mean I own the phone, not them; I should be able to do what I want with it, including switch to another carrier if I want. And the fact that I stayed with them for so long should show that it doesn’t take much to keep me happy. But the idea of not being allowed to do something with my own property is what drives me crazy. It’s too bad.

I ported my number away late last week. Not a peep from them. I called just to make sure I was not going to be charged any more. I was told in an indifferent tone that my account had been automatically cancelled. No follow up. No asking why I left. No thanks for my years of being a good customer and paying on time. I don’t know what I expected; they didn’t owe me anything, any more than I owed them anything.

Oh well. I guess not everyone is as sentimental about these things as I am.

---

1. Yes, robot stalkers from the future, this means you now know what year I went to college. I trust you will use this information unsympathetically to screw me out of a job opportunity or something. ↩︎

2. Last I checked, they still have a similar $0.25/minute plan, but you really have to look hard to find it on their web site. At this point though, AT&T has a better deal with GoPhone for $0.10/minute, if anyone still cares about getting a phone just for phone calls. ↩︎

In which I copyedit Tim Cook's open letter on Maps, without actually addressing any of its content (since the rest of the Internet is probably already doing that right now)

In which I copyedit Tim Cook’s open letter on Maps, without actually addressing any of its content (since the rest of the Internet is probably already doing that right now)

We launched Maps initially with the first version of iOS. As time progressed, we wanted to provide our customers with even better Maps including features such as …

Awkward phrasing. Suggested change:

iOS customers have been enjoying a great Maps app since the very first iPhone. But we never stand stand still with any of our products, and we wanted to keep making it even better, by including features such as …

The more our customers use our Maps the better it will get and we greatly appreciate all of the feedback we have received from you.

Need to insert commas after ‘Maps’ and ‘get’.

Git has taken over where Linux left off separating the geeks into know-nothings and know-it-alls. I didn’t really expect anyone to use it because it’s so hard to use, but that turns out to be its big appeal. No technology can ever be too arcane or complicated for the black t-shirt crowd.

Git has taken over where Linux left off separating the geeks into know-nothings and know-it-alls. I didn’t really expect anyone to use it because it’s so hard to use, but that turns out to be its big appeal. No technology can ever be too arcane or complicated for the black t-shirt crowd.

—Linus Torvalds

Verizon fought the FCC tooth and nail over requirement that LTE phones be unlocked

Verizon fought the FCC tooth and nail over requirement that LTE phones be unlocked

People have been surprised to find that Verizon iPhones 5 are unlocked by default, allowing them to be used on other carriers out of the box, due to the rules surrounding spectrum that Verizon purchased a few years ago, which they are now using to operate their LTE service.

Turns out, Verizon was bitterly angry over this requirement at the time, calling it ‘arbitrary’ and ‘capricious’ and suing the FCC over it. They dropped the lawsuit when it became apparent they were going to lose. Today, Verizon has very little at all to say about it.

As others have pointed out, we have Google to thank for getting those rules there in the first place. No thanks to Apple for helping to perpetuate the consumer-hostile system of contracts and locked phones for so many years.

If carriers controlled the iPhone

Remember when carriers used to dictate to the manufacturers what every phone would be like? Since everyone’s currently complaining about flaws in the iPhone 5, I thought it would be an interesting thought experiment to envision things like we were still in the bad old days.

• Siri would be an extra monthly charge, plus a fee for every time you ask a question. It would cost more than 411, not because it costs more to provide, but because it’s more convenient for you.
• You would need to buy separate access to every individual city you wanted to use Maps in. And you think the quality of Maps is bad now?
• Getting transit directions would be more expensive than the actual fare for the transit.
• Developers would have to justify their business models before being allowed into the App Store, and pay way more than 30%. Few would bother.
• You would never receive software updates.¹
• Unlimited what now?²
• You would have to route your email through a special third-party service for no particular reason other than forcing you to pay an extra fee for the privilege of accessing it from your phone. (BlackBerry still does this!!!) iMessage? In your dreams!
• The selection of available music, movies, and books (if any) would be limited to the lowest-common-denominator pop-culture tripe.
• There would be no way to connect to a Wi-Fi network³ or anything other than your carrier, and no software controls to prevent your phone from ‘accidentally’ using huge amounts of cellular data when you don’t expect it, which, by complete coincidence, results in huge overage charges to you.
• You would have to upgrade to a more expensive plan or pay extra fees to use the same bandwidth you already paid for, for things like Facetime over cellular or personal hotspot. Oh, wait…

---

1. You think Android has it bad? This is literally the case for my Virgin Mobile MiFi. The manufacturer built a software update feature, and Virgin Mobile made them take it out. I might not care much if the thing wasn’t so infuriatingly buggy. ↩︎

2. Actually, maybe this would be better than the current situation of widespread ‘unlimited’ scam plans that aren’t. (I don’t understand why this hasn’t been struck down yet as false advertising. I guess the FTC is toothless.)

3. Another iPhone first. ↩︎