Tuesday, July 06, 2010

Apple's Potemkin iOS exchange support - the problem with being a peripheral customer

Sometimes I run across a bug so astounding my brain rejects it.

That's why I've only now recognized this 2 year old iPhoneOS (iOS 2 and iOS 3) bug ...
Apple - Support - Discussions - Exchange Calendar Sync Issues List ...
... There also doesn't seem to be a way of deleting/editing just one occurence of a meeting in a series.

I tried to delete one single occurence and the iPhone deleted the whole series....
Now I know what happened to several of my recurring meetings over the past year. The bug is with meetings to which one has been invited.

There's no way Apple didn't know about this bug (really, it's more than a mere bug - there are no words ...) when they shipped iPhone OS 2. They chose not to fix it in iOS 3. I wouldn't be surprised if it's still broken in iOS 4.

BlackBerry (RIP) doesn't do this. Windows Mobile (RIP) didn't do this. I suspect this wouldn't be accepted in PalmOS (RIP) or Symbian (RIP). I would bet Android doesn't have this bug.

There are so many painful lessons here. I'll list a few

  1. Apple doesn't want the iPhone to be used by businesses. This goes beyond incompetence into the realm of strategy. Why not?
  2. Of all the five competing platforms who do care about basic Exchange server support, four are dead (RIM is dead, but doesn't know it yet). Business calendar support doesn't matter in the current smartphone market.
  3. I don't need yet another source for antenna rants; the iPhone 4 antenna bug is easy to workaround. This bug doesn't a fix. It's far more important. I need to start reading different bloggers. 
Actually, I doubt there's anyone who writes about bugs like these. That's the real lesson. Productivity users of the iPhone are just along for the ride. We don't get to steer.

PS. Anyone know what calendaring system Apple uses internally? It can't be Exchange Server ...

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