[ music | Soundgarden – Rusty Cage ]

I see Joe Hewitt has quit iPhone development thanks to Apple’s “chickenshit approval process“. I’m easing my way into iPhone development despite my reservations about Apple’s incredibly arbitrary and selectively enforced rules, and find it incredibly telling that as time goes on more and more people are chafing under Apple’s leash. They appear to have responded to customer demand with changes like mature app categories, but reversing course on NIN’s app and the Google Voice fiasco show how incredibly schizophrenic and unfair the system really is. I don’t blame Joe at all.

Someone mentioned to me Mozilla’s Addons site, but there’s a fundamental difference between that and Apple’s App Store. You can choose to develop for Firefox without ever looking at AMO, and you can distribute your addon independently as well. With Apple, you either go through the App Store, or you restrict yourself to EULA-violating methods like Cydia and other jailbreak-only solutions. I have nothing against those solutions, but it severely restricts discoverability and freedom of both developers and users.

What I find so unbelievable is that is that, at least from my perspective, Apple’s policies seemed doomed to failure eventually, and yet they’re still trying to stand by them. I see a redux of IBM of the 1980s. The PC took off thanks to IBM’s wide open policies on clones. IBM felt if they could maintain more control over the platform, there was a lot of profit to be made, and used the genuinely advanced MCA bus to help further those business goals. The consequence in the end was the complete eclipsing of IBM in the PC market. Android may not be on the same level as the iPhone OS yet, but the market seems to have demonstrated time after time that lower cost and greater freedom wins. If Apple keeps strangling their very promising platform, they very well may wind up the next Betamax.