28th
An Outsider’s View of Apple App Store Suckage
Low blood sugar post warning…
Apple’s recent treatment of iPhone developers (reward the hacks but stifle the innovators) is so completely bizarre that it makes me think that someone near the top is actively trying to subvert the whole AppStore concept.
If you deny the best (most innovative, platform-changing) applications a place in the official distribution chain, users and developers alike will be strongly motivated to find other ways to distribute and install software. Add the risk of developing software that will be rejected at the last minute to the ugly NDA-saturated development ecosystem, and you get the perfect recipe for a take-back-my-phone revolution. Will it happen? There’s a bunch of smart people getting really pissed at Apple right now, so maybe it will.
The iPhone is a general-purpose computing device, and a very capable one at that. Trying to control what software will be installed on it is a fool’s game. Either someone at Apple realizes this and is trying to short-circuit the machine, or there was some sort of corporate management swap with AT&T that put an idiot in charge of AppStore.
The upside is that more people than ever will be exposed to un-drm’ed third-party software and realize the full potential of their iPhones. The downside is that by forcing people into the shadows, Apple is increasing the chances that you will install an untrusted app that p0wns your cellphone for realz. We need an Open Source iPhone culture and we need it yesterday.
Google is betting on Android as a developer magnet for this very reason. How long before there’s an iPhone port? And how long before there’s an Android port of Cocoa Touch? Hopefully Apple’s nasty treatment of some key devs will hasten that process and give iPhone apps a way out of Apple’s draconian (but very sexy) platform.
