When contacted, the developer of iBBOM said he was surprised by SingTel's actions. "Such an app actually provides convenience and does no harm to SingTel," he said, though he admitted that he felt SingTel was within its rights to do it.
He said he had not been contacted by SingTel about iBBOM yet. "If they come to me and ask the same, I guess I'll just pull the app too. It's no benefit for me to go against them. The app is free, the ads don't really make money, and I developed it just for fun in maybe 10 hours. Most of the time was spent writing the UI."
SG BBOM was pulled by its developer--Mugunth Kumar--yesterday after SingTel requested that he pull the app if he did not rework his app as a SingTel App Zone app. SingTel objects to having a third party app give users access to information about how much data they use. Interestingly, the fact that there could have been at least three third party apps to provide this functionality suggests that there is a demand for this information, which SingTel itself does not provide via an iPhone app.
While SingTel does not have such an app, its Australian subsidiary Optus recently unveiled an app called My Account that allows users to check their billings, and their call and data usage, among other things.
.
.
Bookmark this post with:
6 comments:
One user of my app even emailed me that Optus doesn't block developers writing apps like this... It's all because they want more developers for their AppZone. As it doesn't sound lucrative, devs are naturally avoiding it...
Move on.
It's a waste of time to go against company's policy. Unless if you're the Google of Singapore.
Just like the Google Voice app case.
There are still potential in other areas.
I advise not to venture too much into telco's business. If they don't accept what you did, it's their risk and their lost, or maybe it's their advantage.
The point is, if you're not making any profit out of it, then just leave it behind.
I'm the developer of the other app (Singtel Data Usage) and have been following the story thanks to your blog posts.
Both my app and iBBOM got onto the App Store this weekend.
I have a similar stance as Mugunth and the developer of iBBOM - apps like ours do no harm to Singtel (unless Singtel wants users to go over their data limits).
My take is just to wait and see when Singtel does contact me about the app.
Cheers,
Chu Yeow
Blog: http://blog.codefront.net/
I hope you and the developer of iBBom have better luck than Kumar. Let's see what SingTel says.
This is clearly not the way to better developer relations, especially when Singtel needs developers more than developers need Singel ....
Yet another protocol change from SingTel.
iBBOM is no longer functioning.
However, SingTel data usage is fixed through a proxy.
Hope we will have use of the ST Usage from ST itself if the app is pulled out as there's no data cap in the iFlexi plans -the $56 for 1gig bundle.
Post a Comment