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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I get the complaint. It's Google's service, it's never been free software, and clearly they're going to exert some control over what clients get to connect. That's clearly within Google's power and rights to do, and it doesn't hurt anyone but competing voice app vendors who want to use Google's (!) service.

How does that compare to banning a Google Voice app from the iPhone store, which while also within Apple's power and rights, is clearly harming consumers who don't get to use the service?

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I'm not sure I get the complaint. It's Apple's operating system, it's never been free software, and clearly they're going to exert some control over what apps get installed. That's clearly within Apple's power and rights to do, and it doesn't hurt anyone but competing app vendors who want to use Apple's (!) operating system.

How does that compare to banning a WebOS app from the accessing the Google Voice service, which while also within Google's power and rights, is clearly harming consumers who don't get to use the service?

You're being amusingly snide, but just plain wrong, sorry. Blocking Google Voice at the app store quite clearly prevents iPhone users from using Google Voice, a service Google wants to provide to them. But for a third party (Apple) those users would be able to use it, so without it they are harmed.

Google doesn't want to provide/support service to WebOS, or other third party clients. These users wouldn't be served anyway, they aren't "harmed" except by reference to a utopian world where we all run free software all the time. It's like demanding that Apple support iTunes on the Linux or Palm Pre; it's a ridiculous argument.

If all they were doing was not supporting third party clients or failing to provide an API, I would agree with you. However, from the article:

> ...they are implementing byzantine security to actually prevent 3rd party apps from accessing the same functionality that their Android native app is capable of or their new mobile site is able to access.

There's a big difference between failing to support and actively creating obstacles to use. Seems like Apple and Google are both equally guilty of this, to the detriment of end users.

Actually, the situation is identical to Apple, if not worse. gDial worked just fine until recently, when Google pulled the rug out from under the developer.

As a gDial Pro user, I feel very much harmed because my app worked great and then suddenly it was broken. Google is within their rights, but they're still behaving badly.

> I'm not sure I get the complaint. It's Apple's operating system, it's never been free software, and clearly they're going to exert some control over what apps get installed. That's clearly within Apple's power and rights to do, and it doesn't hurt anyone but competing app vendors who want to use Apple's (!) operating system.

No, it's the user's phone, and clearly _they_ should exert control over what apps get installed. After sale, what gives apple the moral right to tell the owner of the device that they can't install google voice?

On the other hand, the APIs gvoice exposes run on Google's hardware, using their resources, and their trunk lines. Google has every right to limit use of their equipment.

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