EULAs, Passwords and the Apple AppStore

One thing about being around the industry since the days when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, is that you can get to be a little philosophical about the industry at times. There are two things that I’ve been thinking about again today, where we seem to be in total denial. One is EULAs; the other is passwords.

Has anyone tested EULAs in court lately? It’s hard to imagine most of them being very enforceable. More importantly, does anyone EVER read them? I was amused a few years back when I was installing an application, clicked over the EULA and the application said “how could you possibly have read that in 1.076 seconds?”. That’s a fair cop.

Today though, it’s the EULAs at the Apple AppStore that just seem totally stupid. A while back, I installed the genuine Twitter app on my iPhone. Previously I was using Halo. The new Twitter app seemed pretty cool, right up till the day it had an update available. On the screen of my phone, it kept prompting me to update it. So I thought “hey this is cool, I’ll update it”. To update the FREE application, I had to log in to the AppStore. Doing that on the phone is a bit cumbersome but ok. But after I did so, it tells me that I now need to agree to the new AppStore terms and conditions. Once I had done that, it then told me that I should try my “purchase” again.

But the super annoying thing is that EVERY time I go to update the Twitter app, the AppStore terms and conditions seem to have changed. So this happens EVERY time. But what really impresses me about this process, is that the terms and conditions that you need to agree to occupy 58 PAGES. Has ANYONE EVER read all those 58 pages? And do I really need to read and agree to 58 pages of terms and conditions every time I want to update my free Twitter app? On a phone? You have to be kidding. I’d love to see the page view statistics from Apple that show how many people have EVER retrieved most of those pages.

The other mild form of insanity that I’m thinking about today is passwords. We always tell users to:

  • Use different passwords for every system
  • Make the passwords very complex
  • Change the passwords regularly
  • Never write down the passwords

Users get blamed when they don’t follow the rules but I’m sorry, is it even humanly possible to follow the rules? We have to stop this sort of nonsense if we ever want our industry taken seriously by the general public. And I think I have to go back to using Halo instead of the free genuine Twitter app.

And as for the courts, I can well imagine many judges not being too convinced about enforcing rules that it’s almost impossible for a human to comply with.

2011-01-19