UPDATED 15:44 EDT / APRIL 19 2011

Apple Under Questionable Behavior

Apple’s found itself standing before court officials quite a bit lately, dealing with antitrust suits, and more recently, personal file access.  The iPad maker asked a federal judge to dismiss a consumer antitrust lawsuit claiming the company limited choice by linking iPod music downloading to its iTunes music store, Bloomberg reports.  The reason for blocking iPod music downloads was to improve downloading quality for iTunes customers.

“Apple’s view is that iPods work better when consumers use the iTunes jukebox rather than third party software that can cause corruption or other problems,” said Apple’s attorney.

The lawsuit, dating from 2005, involves FairPlay, Apple’s FairPlay digital rights management system that blocked the playing of song on iPods from other sources than iTunes. Four years later, Apple gave up this practice and cited 58 consumer complaints about problems playing downloads from other companies as a reason for its actions, although no independent testing had been carried out.

Today was a very busy day for Apple’s complaints department as Tapjoy, the mobile app distribution service, indicates that Apple has rejected their apps because they were running incentivized app installations, where one app encourages users to download another app as a kind of advertising promotion.  Apple has not yet formulated any official reply, but a closer look at the developer program license agreement brings a little light onto this matter:

“Developers who attempt to manipulate or cheat the user reviews or chart ranking in the App Store with fake or paid reviews, or any other inappropriate methods, will be removed from the iOS Developer Program.”

If Apple takes matters even further, such a decision would affect about half of the mobile ad unit, involving players such as Flurry, AdMob and W3i. If this is the case, there is possibility for Apple to have another antitrust lawsuit filed against.

Apple seems to face a few difficulties when it comes to meeting consumer expectations, and its long promised cloud services might well fall into this category.  With the construction of the data centers throughout the world, and its existing data center in North Carolina, Apple promised customers that they will soon be able to access files and multimedia content with its iOS devices. It seems the company is not yet physically prepared to fulfil the promise of the personal cloud it marketed.  There are serious gaps in infrastructure since at the moment it is practically impossible to access and edit 100GB video files using cloud-based services as carriers need to develop intelligent business cases through which to support changing customer need.


A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU