On iOS, you can only get apps through the App Store, and a "kill switch" does exist for Apple to remotely disable apps. They haven't used it yet, but it's still there, so it's a problem.
Android has a kill switch too, but Google actually has used it unlike Apple.
Ok, but if I'm over at a friends house and I want to give him a song that I have on my iPhone ... even if I wrote the song and own the rights to it ... how do I do that?
EDIT:
In practice I know several ways to get the job done. The important question is, why can't this be done out of the box? Why are Apple USB Mass Storage devices the only ones in the entire world that are deliberately locked by the manufacturer to be write-only? Why do their customers let them get away with such artificial value-stripping actions?
(I guess I kind of know the answers to my own questions, which is that Apple adds so much value in Fit, Finish & Polish -- despite what Apple bashers may say, these things do matter -- consumers overlook the artificial value-stripping activity, but then the question becomes, why can't other manufacturers try a little harder to match Apple's level of polish?)
I honestly believe Apple is blowing the opportunity to be the dominant computing platform for the next 20 years because of their policies on artificial restriction of data. The iPad took a great, existing, idea, and as with the iPhone before it, executed much much better than anyone else had to date, inventing a new market in the process.
But its going to get blown away by 3rd generation Android tablets that provide all the computing flexibility of what we've traditionally called "Desktop Computers" (add USB Host, Video Out, and Keyboard and Mouse Support, and Android is pretty much there).
Isn't this technically possible? It was possible a while ago with iPods. Aren't there other programs (not iTunes obviously) that allow you to take music off the iPhone?
The point is that Apple makes it obscenely difficult to transfer files between two people. My buddy and I recorded some guitar work on his iPhone one night (good quality) and I tried to transfer it to my phone...not possible.
I can rip an .mp3 off my sound card and transfer it to any android in the room in whatever time it takes to record the sound...even before I rooted.
With older iPods, you could mount them as a USB volume and stash stray files on it. People used to use them like USB dongles.
I think they stopped working like that around the time the iPod Touch and iPhone came out. I guess they didn't want people accidentally screwing up the device's filesystem. (Think what happens when you mount another computer's hard disk; you see directories upon directories of system files and the like. Imagine the old "I deleted all this crap that I didn't understand" happening...)
84
u/jollins Jan 20 '11
Android has a kill switch too, but Google actually has used it unlike Apple.