Rseven Blog
I met Robert Scoble last night at a Rackspace event & he was very cool to hear my demo of Rseven and interviewed me about it (you can listen to the interview here). He quickly get what Rseven is all about and deemed it mondo cool; which is high praise indeed. When I had to explain to him the reason why we don’t have an official iPhone app (no API to access call history & messages), he saw it as an example of how the “openness” of Android OS makes it better than iOS.
It is true, that we have more freedom with Android (and Symbian & Windows Mobile) to give the users the best features of Rseven but the limitation of iOS is not a technical matter, it’s more of a business decision by Apple. I’m not going to argue about the definition of open platform for Android, people far smarter than me have discussed about this at length (read this post by Tim Bray and the subsequent comments). To me the relative openness of Android vs iOS reflects more on how Google and Apple generates their revenue.
Google have stated many times that their support of Android is for the purpose of generating revenue from mobile ads ($1b annual revenue announced last fall). Thus they make Android open source and give a lot of control to developers to make anything they can think of. Apple on the other hand, develops iOS to sell their cool devices and the media that’s consumed on it. So it makes sense for them to control the user experience for consistency so that their customers can expect the same experience as they buy more Apple devices.
However this also means that Apple have more control over user data and sometimes you feel that you do not really have full ownership of the devices (read Charlie Brooker’s article and another view from the publishing industry).
Well we at Rseven are platform agnostic, we want to give the best Rseven features that we can make, on any platform that you use (WP7, Bada anyone?). And we feel that since you are the owner of your data, you should have the right to take the data from your devices, keep it anywhere you want and use them however you want.
