I don't understand their position on DRM here. It makes no sense. The EFF is complaining that the DRM required by the App Store is onerous and puts restrictions on what users can do with their app, and says "we want them to be broadly available to others to use, adapt, and customize".
But that's nonsense. If the EFF hands me a binary for an app, it hardly matters whether it's DRM'd or not as long as I can still run it. The extreme minority of people are capable of doing anything remotely interesting with a binary without access to source code. If the EFF wants people to be able to adapt and customize their app, all they have to do is release it under a permissive open-source license.
In fact, if this really was a purely moral stance, they could have developed the application and released the source without ever publishing it to the App Store, thus allowing users to compile and use the application themselves. But they didn't do that. Instead, this seems to just be a flimsy excuse for the EFF to make a bunch of noise about Apple in order to drum up some PR.
And quoting from the README: "Although it works on both iOS and Android, the app is only targeting Android as of today. If you need to deploy to iOS as well, please check out the Ionic docs or contact the project maintainer for help."
If that actually works on iOS then why didn't they talk about it in the article? It would have been much better PR for them to say that they have a functioning app and the source is available.
My expectation from that README is that Ionic (which I've never heard of before) supports iOS but that the app itself has not actually been configured for or tested with iOS.
We did most of the development and testing, but didn't get it 100% production ready after we decided we wouldn't release the app.
Since the main functionality of the app is the push notification service, having users compile their own apps wouldn't really be very helpful. Users need to subscribe to our push notification channel via APNS, and they can't do that if they're compiling themselves.
We could have ignored that and built our own, less-than-realtime push service, but even still, having users compile their own apps means that our users have to pay the $99 and sign the developer agreements instead of us, and I don't think that's a very reasonable request.
I think the best solution is for us to release on the Cydia marketplace, and I think it's pretty likely we'll do that.
Cydia requires jail breaking and that's a decidedly user-hostile thing to suggest, especially when it comes from a respected name like the EFF. Jailbreaking disables crucial security measures on iOS, and many things people like to install after jailbreaking destabilize the OS (granted, you can jailbreak without installing those hacks). It's not a coincidence that every time there has been news of malware affecting iOS, it only affected jail broken devices.
All in all, I would vastly prefer that the EFF not encourage users to jailbreak.
What are you getting worked up over? A digital rights organization expressing their digital rights? Sometimes freedom comes with greater responsibility and a slight inconvenience. I'd rather have that responsibility and inconvenience than just not care.
The right to jailbreak, and the recommendation to jailbreak, are two completely different things.
I absolutely support the right to jailbreak your device. But I would never agree to actually jailbreak my own device, and I strongly encourage others to avoid it as well.
The issue here isn't that the EFF is expressing their rights. It's the fact that if the EFF releases an iOS app exclusively on Cydia then they're endorsing jailbreaking and encouraging people who don't know any better that they should do this. I would imagine there would be some pretty negative things said about the EFF if they released a Windows application that required users to disable all anti-virus software. That's basically what endorsing jailbreaking is, for iOS.
But that's nonsense. If the EFF hands me a binary for an app, it hardly matters whether it's DRM'd or not as long as I can still run it. The extreme minority of people are capable of doing anything remotely interesting with a binary without access to source code. If the EFF wants people to be able to adapt and customize their app, all they have to do is release it under a permissive open-source license.
In fact, if this really was a purely moral stance, they could have developed the application and released the source without ever publishing it to the App Store, thus allowing users to compile and use the application themselves. But they didn't do that. Instead, this seems to just be a flimsy excuse for the EFF to make a bunch of noise about Apple in order to drum up some PR.