jn4

FB, G clearly violated the ToS of the Enterprise Acc (no public distribution of such Apps) and Apple has rightly suspended their enterprise distribution cert.

But Apple has been selective in enforcing this rule. If I recall, for many years Uber's driver App was distributed as an enterprise app. Uber has always claimed that drivers are not employees and so this was in clear violation of the ToS.

Imo, Uber's use case was legit. During early days Uber probably did not wish to have 2 Apps in the App Store to avoid customer confusion. Or maybe they were actively updating the Driver App and did not want to add days of App review holding up every update.

Apple should change their ToS and allow such use cases in some form. At times this would get misused (like FB/G) but opening up the walled garden to enable such "private" apps to be easily distributed can make iOS a more interesting platform. In any case they always have the final kill switch of revoking an Enterprise Cert for malicious use.

Australian banks have a good thing going down under: they are the most profitable in the world in terms of profits as % of GDP. They may not make as much in payments but seem to have plenty of money making options.

[1] http://www.news.com.au/finance/economy/australian-economy/au...

In Bangalore, the driver seems to be making $3 for every $1 spent by the passenger.

For Uber, this translates to about $7.5m/month of subsidy in Bangalore alone.

Source: http://capitalmind.in/2015/10/the-economics-of-using-uber-in...

WhatsApp is of comparable scale and is doing this with 100x less servers.

As per [1], in March 2014 they were handling 20B messages/day (with 600M pics, 100M videos) with just about 550 servers.

My guess would be that, every day more photos are shared on WhatsApp than on FB.

Major difference: At present, WhatsApp does not "keep" your messages or sell "you" to advertisers.

[1] http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/3/31/how-whatsapp-grew-...

There is rightly a consensus that iOS Apps are generally better than Android Apps.

IMO this is mainly because of the iOS SDK/Xcode and not due to the App Store review process.

The review system is geared for consumer focused apps. Business Apps need specialized domain knowledge and complex setups to review. That is why there are so many consulting firms doing this for clients.

The review process currently just drains some resources but may really start hurting the iOS ecosystem when business Apps become the driver for mobile platform choice. It already is in the developing world because for many, the phone is their only computer.

A user may really want to use iOS, but if my key problem is solved by an Android only App - I will need to use Android.

This is one of the reasons why we ended up with Windows dominating.

iOS now has a robust sandboxing and an excellent permission system - so the risk of an App doing harm is low. All apps without in-app purchases should be automatically approved. Approvals can always be revoked later if issues surface.