Often, when browsing the web on my iPhone or iPad, I'll get a full-screen banner suggesting that I get the iOS application that corresponds to this website. Because these notifications are full-screen, they prevent me from reading whatever it is I'm trying to read, and tend to fall into one of three categories:

• Help Me Install an App I Already Have: I already have the app, but for some reason I'm not using it -- possibly I've come here from a web search. The custom notification will often only send me to the app store for an app that I already have, meanwhile prevent me from accessing the content I wanted to access.
• Help Me Install an App I Don't Want: This is often true for things like forum systems. I just want to read something someone wrote somewhere on the web, I don't want to install yet another app for your particular website -- that's why I'm using the web.
• You Have an App? Occasionally, they're actually telling me about an app that I don't have and would actually like to have. In this scenario, I may be willing to download the app right away, or I may want to do it later. Unfortunately, even if I follow the link to download your app, I might then still want to read whatever I came here to read, and if I go back to the link that brought me to your site, I might immediately fall into the first category again, where you tell me about the app I already have instead of showing me what I actually wanted to see.

This last option is the only one where the full-screen banner is actually useful, and even then it might be something I prefer to do another time.

Fortunately, iOS 6 has a new feature, smart app banners, that are less intrusive and more useful, not to mention very easy to implement. Using these, you can redirect from the web to an application without a custom full-screen banner.

Looks great -- I hope websites start using this path instead of building their own full-screen banners. And if you're looking for someone to help you implement smart app banners, get in touch.

Dave Winer suggests that using iOS has a flip side -- Apple controlling mobile through the App Store:

Right now it's the only open source mobile OS that has a chance against IOS. If there is no alternative to IOS then Apple will have exclusive control over what makes it to market. That is a future none of us should want to live in.  

...

I don't like Google any more than I like Apple. But at least they don't control the channel of apps to users of Android. That's a huge deal. It makes up for a lot of Android's inadequacies. And if Google fucks us, let's find another home.

John Gruber points out that you could argue the Flip Side to Android is your loss of privacy to Google:

But, to quote Neil McCauley, there is a flip side to that coin. Winer’s perspective is that Apple is the bigger threat. A different perspective would be that Google is the bigger threat, and that using Apple products is a way to better protect our privacy and personal information. 

Fear of Apple is about losing control over the software on our computers. Fear of Google is about losing control over our privacy.

These are both good arguments.  Apple's control over the App Store has some positive effects, but it's clear that it puts a lot of power in Apple's hands and they can and will make capricious decisions that we may disagree with.

Google absolutely wants to know as much about you as it can and sell you in aggregate form to advertisers. That's their business, and if you don't like that, then storing most of your personal information on Google's services is probably scary.

I think it's a mistake to link Android only to Google. As has become entirely clear, the open-ness of Android is to be open to the manufacturers and carriers who often close it with respect to its customers. Putting your faith in Android is not merely to trust Google, but to trust Motorola, HTC, Samsung, etc. and Verizon, AT&T, Telus, Rogers, Sprint, T-Mobile, Orange, etc.

Pre-iPhone mobile phones were entirely controlled by the manufacturers and carriers. The iPhone was in many respect a great liberation the mobile phone market. Although Apple retains the same powers that the manufacturers and carriers once did, they attempt and mostly succeed to use those powers to improve your experience as a mobile customer (and secondarily to profit from it), and they keep everyone else's hands outside of the cookie jar.

Putting your faith in Android is putting your faith in the mobile phone ecosystem that kept a stranglehold on your phone for years and years before Apple came along. If you think those people are more trustworthy than Apple, you're probably drinking the Open kool-aid.

If Google used its Android powers to force the carriers to make the software open to their customers, to allow people to install whatever they want without worrying about carrier agreements, to prevent spyware installed by carriers, to encourage phone manufacturers to update to the latest version of Android -- if Google was open to customers then maybe I'd agree.

For me, Dave Winer's argument doesn't hold water. I don't see the value in wresting control away from Apple just to hand the power to a larger and shadier group of companies.

I don't get it.

Apple rumors are getting out of hand. It's bad enough that everyone has an opinion about products that Apple hasn't yet announced, but when these rumors start to get two generations out, it's ludicrous.

@gruber highlights @counternotions on "Why Weren't Samsung and Apple Able to Settle?":

The other possibility, of course, is that Apple never even contacted Samsung before filing the suit.

That would have been my assumption. Apple doesn't want a conversation, doesn't want a settlement, here. They probably want something more like this:

• Samsung to stop making phones that are so derivative of iPhone.
• All handset makers, Android or otherwise, to be afraid of mimicking the best parts of the iPhone design.
• To damage the momentum of Android by encouraging handset manufacturers to see it as a potential liability.