It's not meant as an insult to anyone. In the thread I posted that comment in, you'll notice that we basically had a user assigning cause to the alarm system the behavior of a widget that was unilaterally making noise without the user explicitly giving it permission to do so.

Part of my job is to protect users.  It's a responsibility that too many companies fail to take seriously, but we do.

Based on the feedback on this issue, we've started to build in a privileging system that would allow us to grant temporary privileges to subsets of ASnative functionality to well-behaved widgets, so we're not simply ignoring that.  The client side is done - I already showed wrybread how to use it - but the server side is not complete and there are several policy decisions that have to be made in the light of the breakdown in user security this represents.  Among the behaviors that are supported are access to the sound controls and streaming subsystem.

In addition, I'm looking unto allowing widgets to have the ability to send events to the Control Panel just as one can do from the underlying system - that would at least have the Control Panel have some clue what's going on, and the hope is that widget developers will choose to work through that system for streaming so that these things can be properly managed.  That way we can at least give the user some way to block unwanted behavior, which can't really be done with allowing access to ASnatives.

We are thinking about something similar, but server-side - the author would provide a list of desired permissions, and the user is prompted to grant those permissions when they add the widget to a channel.  The widget author would have to accommodate the user choosing not to grant those permissions to their widgets.

With streaming music, I'd still strongly favor the official, documented music source approach - administering multiple different types of music sources (on some devices, music is not handled by btplay), particularly with the alarm subsystem so deeply tied into it, sleep times, resumption, etc, require some central arbiter like the Control Panel to be involved.  Some music sources require deep administration just to transition from one track to the next, or to renew session tokens.  The Control Panel takes care of dispatching that sort of stuff.

Note that Apple is actually more strict than we are - simply reading the GPS doesn't change the machine state, but does have privacy implications, so they block it by default. Apple doesn't even *offer* a mechanism to launch background streaming, while we do, although using a special mechanism.