iTunes App Store Failwhales, Bodes Ill for the Future
Posted by Nirav | Filed under Apple, iPhone
(Sorry for another iPhone/Apple post.)
So basically, it’s all gone to hell. The iTunes App Store is down, meaning a couple things: new iPhone 3G owners can’t activate their phones, and more disastrously, old iPhone owners attempting to upgrade to version 2.0 will get their phones bricked.
As Merlin Mann notes, “this is not the Friday Apple had wanted.” I propose that in particular, it doesn’t bode well for the future. Apple, like Microsoft and many other companies, is moving towards a partial services model. But for this to work, consumers have to be able to trust that when they want a service from Apple, Apple will provide. These server failures and overloads don’t exactly give me faith that Apple can uphold its end of the push notification system that iPhone app developers were promised (releasing in September) and more than that, strengthens my already .Mac-fueled skepticism that MobileMe can indeed be my own personal Exchange server. MobileMe’s already failing, and it’s barely a couple days old; it’s almost seeming like Apple just dumped an additional load on its outage-prone .Mac servers (adding on push email, contacts, calendars and web service) and somehow, perhaps delusionally, expected them to grin, bear it, and work fine.
I’m reading blog posts now from TUAW and others that iPhone activations are again working, but the fact that buying a new phone or even merely updating your old, previously-working phone landed you with a very nicely designed paperweight scares me, and will also spook the enterprise customers that Apple has been courting lately. Businesses can’t trust iPhones for corporate use if there’s the potential they’re going to be bricked for a morning, and I certainly won’t trust MobileMe for my email, contacts, and calendars if it’s going to fall this close to the .Mac tree.