Apple’s System Apps

John Gruber:

Users aren’t the only ones who are constricted by iOS’s system apps being tied the system as a whole. Apple is too — updates to these apps only ship as part of an entire iOS system update. A bug fix in one system app — Mail, Safari, Weather, whatever — doesn’t ship to users until the next release of the entire OS. When the iPad debuted with iBooks as an App Store app rather than a built-in system app, I at first assumed it was a matter of international copyright negotiations — iOS devices ship to far more countries than which Apple has (thus far) negotiated e-book rights. That may be part of the reason, but clearly another is that it allows Apple to ship updates independently of the OS. The iPad is still on OS 3.2, but iBooks, as of today, is now on version 1.1.

Interesting. I had thought that iBooks was not a built-in app because of anti-trust considerations—Apple might well have taken notice of the kind of trouble that bundling landed Microsoft in and decided that it wasn’t worth the risk, so it made App Store pop up a request to download and install it on first launch rather than installing it by default as part of the operating system.

Gruber’s idea sounds reasonable to me, too, but it doesn’t necessarily explain the existence of apps like Stocks or Weather: nothing prevents Apple from making those installable from the App Store, too, particularly considering that there are plenty of third-party alternative that provide superior functionality—often for free. I don’t think that people really have a problem with Settings, or Mail, but to have to deal with those two, given how rich the App Store ecosystem has become, is just plain weird.