Dave Metzener's Weblog

OK, what the hell is the matter with you Apple! This blackmail tactic of threatening to remove an application from the AppStore because you don’t like a feature is really getting very very old!

I just learned that Apple is threatening to remove iStat from Bjango if they don’t remove a feature in the application that attempts to free up memory that is otherwise not being used.

As you can see from the screen shot to the right, the first section of the applications data is a pie chart of memory usage. Wired and Active is memory that is currently being used by applications, Inactive and Free is memory that is not being used. The “FREE MEMORY” button to the right of the pie chart allows the user to attempt to free up memory that is not being used at the time.

For this example, tapping the FREE MEMORY button would probably free up about a quarter of the memory currently being colored in the pie chart. This has been my experience with the app. It probably attempts to fill the device with used memory by allocating as much memory as it’s allowed, then freeing it up. This will force the device to “Page Out” memory, freeing up some memory for other apps.

Typically, the Mail, Phone and iPod apps don’t quit when you press the Home button. So they take up memory that may not be needed if you are not listening to music. You don’t need Mail in memory if you are not reading messages and you don’t need “most” of the Phone app in memory either.

The news hit Twitter just a few hours ago directly from Bjango. Here are the tweets from their Twitter account: http://twitter.com/bjango

We’ve been asked to remove iStat’s free memory feature. This leaves us with two choices. Resubmit with free mem gon (cont) http://tl.gd/dme8

You all know who asked Keep the replies coming. User feedback is a VERY important part of this decision.

Those who want more info: we simply don’t have any. It is exactly what it is.

All the detail we have: iStat will be removed from the store unless the free mem feature goes.

If you don’t update iStat to version 1.1, then yes, you get to keep 1.0 as is, free mem included.

On the plus side: If we remove the free mem feature, we will be able to update iStat with all the features we’ve been wanting to add.

We haven’t made a decision yet but it seems like people would rather have updates even if it means free memory is gone.

Now, there were a lot of folks chiming in with suggestions including myself. I would personally like to keep iStat as is, and purchase a new iStat app that doesn’t have the free memory feature, but has the new features that Bjango is promising. Were not talking a huge amount of money here. If I paid full price for the app, it was $1.99. I would gladly eat that for a way of freeing memory other than turning off my phone, then back on. That is so annoying and is just because there is no memory free to run the application I am attempting to run.

I have seen symptoms in several apps I run. With PandoraBox, I’ll see application entries with all blank data, meaning that there wasn’t enough free memory to load the app description and icon into memory to display. I’ve seen apps shutdown seconds after starting. After I free the memory, the applications work fine.

I have to wonder what in the world Apple doesn’t like about the ability to “Page Out” memory not being used presently by other applications. It’s what a Paged Memory Management system is designed to do. If the “embeded” version of OS X is not capable of PMM, I would have to question Apple’s saying that the iPhone/iPod touch uses an Embeded OS X.

As usual, Apple is not stating way Bjango has to remove the feature from its app. Just that they remove it or the app is removed from the store. I’m actually surprised that Apple actually gave Bjango a warning that they would remove the app if they don’t comply. We have clearly seen examples of Apple pulling the plug on an application and surprising the developers with the news after the fact.

So, come on Apple, get your head out of your collective asses and fix this AppStore problem, or you are not going to be seeing the applications you would like to see in your wonderful AppStore in the future. Just hundreds of thousands of “Bulk” apps that we all enjoy so much right now. (You know what I’m talking about, don’t you Brighthouse Labs?)