More Fodder for the iPhone App Store Phantom Zone

By  |  Tuesday, September 1, 2009 at 11:12 am

NapsterAllThingsD’s Peter Kafka is reporting on a neat-sounding Napster client for the iPhone–and the fact that Napster says that high licensing costs for mobile streaming make the app a no-go, so it hasn’t even bothered to submit it to Apple for approval.

Napster for the iPhone joins a bunch of other promising iPhone apps which, for one reason or another, you can’t currently get: Google Voice (still being contemplated by Apple), Rhapsody (submitted for approval a bit over a week ago), and LaLa (still MIA, ten months after the company wowed me with a demo). Won’t it be cool when they’re all readily available?  (I’m being optimistic and assuming it’s when rather than if.)

 
5 Comments


Read more: , ,

5 Comments For This Post

  1. L1A Says:
    September 1st, 2009 at 12:50 pm

    1gb of music on my ipod > millions of songs from those streaming sites where it plays random music i don’t even like and you can skip up to 3 times an hour.

    and why don’t they just make a web app if they are worried getting rejected? i think they are just making these apps for free publicity they get when apple says no. and then we’ll be reading for another week apple is evil, x company is good!

  2. DaveZatz Says:
    September 1st, 2009 at 12:54 pm

    I’m hopeful Google Voice, in one form or another, gets app approval and assume Rhapsody is a slam dunk. Napster’s licensing costs are Best Buy’s problem. If they cna’t figure out how to offset them and make a profit, they need to find another business model or maybe just put it out of its misery once and for all.

  3. Marc Says:
    September 1st, 2009 at 1:04 pm

    Spotify has been approved (although it’s not available in the US yet, and it’s overpriced IMO)

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8225731.stm

    So if they don’t get approved then we’d have to assume it’s because of AT&T, right?

  4. Marc Says:
    September 1st, 2009 at 1:07 pm

    All these applications are limited if they can’t run in the background. I use a third party podcast tool because the Apple limit the iPhone to save bandwidth, and it’s annoying not being able to save a podcast to my iTunes podcasts and play them using the standard iPod application, in the background.

    If Apple don’t do something about this, then there’s a generation of rather frustrated iPhone owners who will be switching to Android, Pre or even Windows Mobile 7 in a few years.

  5. Bobman Says:
    September 2nd, 2009 at 4:29 am

    I use Lala and Slacker all the time; if they would approve those (in the case of Slacker, the caching version not the streaming version), I just might buy an iTouch.

    What is with the mental block Apple has about giving some people what the want: music subscriptions.