Why I’m not upgrading to Omnifocus 2

I like Omni­fo­cus¹ a lot. I can’t say that I’ve mas­tered it to the point where it has ful­ly become a trust­ed repos­i­to­ry for my tasks, but it is use­ful for keep­ing track of the things I have to do. The new ver­sion looks great. I got the demo ver­sion to test out before buy­ing the upgrade and it is a big improve­ment. The price tag is some­what high but in my opin­ion it’s a worth­while upgrade.

So why would­n’t I buy the upgrade?

There are two rea­sons. One of them is because of Omn­i­group’s deci­sions (in par­tic­u­lar a deci­sion I would­n’t fault them for, but you’ll see that it is a deal­break­er) and the oth­er is Apple’s fault.

Apple’s fault?

Yep. I hate to pun­ish one par­ty for the deci­sions made by anoth­er, but it can’t be helped. The rea­son: Apple has blocked every attempt to add a Bit­coin wal­let appli­ca­tion to the iOS cat­a­log (mean­ing the Apple App store).

Peo­ple have com­plained about this since the advent of the App Store: it gives Apple monop­o­lis­tic con­trol over the mar­ket of soft­ware for iPhones (and iPods and iPads). I actu­al­ly appre­ci­ate that Apple acts as a gate­keep­er to keep mal­ware out of the iOS ecosys­tem. I real­ly do. What I object to is that Apple uses this posi­tion to con­trol the kinds of apps that its cus­tomers can and can­not have.

App devel­op­ers are not allowed to sell or even give away any apps that com­pete with Apple’s built-in apps. They can’t get away with it for high-pro­file apps — too many peo­ple have com­plained when, for exam­ple, Apple dragged their feet in approv­ing the Google Maps app after they switched Apple’s Maps app to a non-Google map source. But Apple wants a lock on any­thing that looks like com­merce. If you sell stuff, there are only two ways to do it: away from your device (or inside a brows­er where you may as well be away from your device) and using Apple’s gateway.

A Bit­coin wal­let appli­ca­tion would appar­ent­ly under­mine Apple’s grand strat­e­gy of con­trol­ling (and tak­ing a cut from) all pay­ments made through their devices. If you can make a pay­ment in some form that Apple does­n’t pro­vide, then… I don’t know. It’s the slip­pery slope to anar­chy, I suppose.

But who real­ly cares about all this? Yes, they con­trol their devices and their device’s ecosys­tem, but it does­n’t real­ly direct­ly affect us, does it?

It affects me, because I use Bit­coin. So there is a prac­ti­cal down­side to get­ting an iOS device. More­over, I don’t like the idea that Apple is telling me that I can’t use Bitcoin.

In case Apple is lis­ten­ing, I am in the mar­ket for a cell­phone, and I am the sort of per­son that spends mon­ey on Apple prod­ucts. I’ve owned three iPhones so far: an orig­i­nal first gen­er­a­tion iPhone, the iPhone 3GS, and the iPhone 4S. I’ve owned two iPads, and pur­chased two oth­er iDe­vices as gifts: an iPad and an iPod Touch. I have put hun­dreds — per­haps thou­sands — of dol­lars into soft­ware for iOS. Switch­ing to Android will be a fair­ly major expense as well as an inconvenience.

Also, the last time I owned an Android device, I hat­ed it. Hat­ed it. It was a dif­fi­cult, unin­tu­itive device devoid of any evi­dence that there was thought put into user inter­face or user expe­ri­ence. It goes with­out say­ing that there was no con­sis­ten­cy of inter­face from app to app; even on iOS there is very lit­tle inter­face con­sis­ten­cy between apps, but there is some.

Peo­ple say Android is bet­ter now, but peo­ple always say that when the device they’ve always pre­ferred has a new ver­sion and they are talk­ing to some­one who did­n’t like an ear­li­er ver­sion. But I hope that they are right. The Android device I had was a Droid Incred­i­ble which ran (and still does, accord­ing to the per­son who I gave it to) Gin­ger­bread. They’re up to KitKat now, so that’s four revi­sions since Gin­ger­bread. Per­haps stuff is in fact bet­ter now.

It’s not only Bit­coin. I also con­sid­er pri­va­cy and secu­ri­ty to be a pre­mi­um. If there’s one thing that you ought to be able to com­pile and install your­self, it’s encryp­tion soft­ware. I’ll take pro­pri­etary no-source appli­ca­tions for many things, but encryp­tion must be open source, or it can­not be trusted.

In prac­ti­cal terms, there are just as many bar­ri­ers to com­pil­ing and installing soft­ware on Android as there are on iOS. Does it real­ly mat­ter whether you «root» your device or «jail­break» it? Yet some­how it’s not the same. Per­haps it’s an irra­tional response to the FUD² Apple has spread about jail­break­ing iPhones. I’d install Cyanogen­Mod with­out think­ing twice, but am high­ly skep­ti­cal about jail­break­ing an iPhone.

On fur­ther con­sid­er­a­tion, even if the dif­fer­ence between root­ing an Android and jail­break­ing an iPhone exists only in my head, the rea­son that that idea is in my head is because of the state­ments I’ve read com­ing from Apple. So again, if I stop buy­ing iPhones, it’s because of deci­sions that Apple made. Apple has suc­cess­ful­ly con­vinced me that an iPhone is an unsuit­able device. Good job, Apple.

What about Omnifocus?

I con­sid­er Omn­i­group to be an unfor­tu­nate casu­al­ty here, though they sort of did make their own bed. Omn­i­group only makes soft­ware for Apple devices. They make soft­ware for iOS and Mac­in­tosh. Noth­ing else, and they have no plans to ever change that.

I can’t blame them. Omn­i­group is stick­ing to their core com­pe­ten­cy and devel­op­ing for the plat­forms they love. Good for them. But this means I’m stuck with the choice between Omni­fo­cus on the one hand, secu­ri­ty and pri­va­cy on the oth­er. Unless I change my mind about some of the above, Omni­fo­cus will lose.

In the mean­time, 2do³ looks like a decent replace­ment with ver­sions on Android, iOS, and Mac. Sor­ry, no Win­dows or Lin­ux but that’s not some­thing that is like­ly to affect me.

Is it con­ceiv­able that I will change my mind? Sure. Noth­ing is carved in stone. My cur­rent plan is to get a rel­a­tive­ly inex­pen­sive Android phone and see how it goes. If my expe­ri­ence with it is any­thing like the last time, I’ll prob­a­bly give up and buy an iPhone, or get a fea­ture­phone with but­tons and for­get about hav­ing a smart­phone. Or go back to only hav­ing a land­line, as is cur­rent­ly the case.

How­ev­er, if it goes well, I have my eye on the Black­phone. It’s prici­er and it’s not even guar­an­teed not to be vapor­ware, but it’s got good peo­ple behind it and it can (prob­a­bly) be trusted.

Trusted?

Yes, trust­ed. I don’t want to hear about how Android can be trust­ed. Yes, per­haps Cyanogen­Mod can be trust­ed. But Android? Google has already been proven to include secu­ri­ty com­pro­mis­es on pur­pose. The idea that Android could be a secure plat­form (as it cur­rent­ly exists) is laugh­able. Is iOS bet­ter? Not real­ly, but sort of. I trust Apple to keep oth­er peo­ple from spy­ing on me with­out Apple’s per­mis­sion. Those last three words are key. I don’t for a sec­ond think that Apple would hes­i­tate to hand over the entire con­tents of my phone or hard dri­ve if they could get away with it. But they’ll do what­ev­er they can to make sure that any­one that wants my data goes through them to get it.

That’s a cold com­fort, but ulti­mate­ly mobile secu­ri­ty requires the same kind of com­mon sense and vig­i­lance that desk­top secu­ri­ty has from day one: don’t install soft­ware from untrust­ed sources. Yeah, some­times mal­ware sneaks its way into trust­ed sources, but that’s pret­ty rare.

The first step is mak­ing sure the sys­tem itself can be trust­ed. Apple and Google both have made it clear: they want us to trust them rather than trust their sys­tems. I do trust both com­pa­nies — sort of. You know the old say­ing about how you trust your moth­er but still cut the deck when you play cards with her? What if some­one you trust­ed refused to let you cut the cards? I don’t know about any­one else, but I would­n’t play for any stakes in such a game.

That’s what Apple and Google both want us to do. They assure us that they can be trust­ed and that we don’t need to do any­thing to pro­tect our pri­va­cy and secu­ri­ty. Yes, I trust them. But they are refus­ing to let me cut the deck, so I don’t want to play their game.

I’m sor­ry Ommi­group. You are a casu­al­ty in Apple’s refusal to act like the trust­wor­thy part­ner they (prob­a­bly) are.