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Indies: Apple Hates You

This week­end, much ink and many bytes will be devoted to breath­less review of Apple’s new won­der machine, the iPad. But, to the type of peo­ple that read sites like TNL.net, the iPad is the begin­ning of a dif­fer­ent world: one where the tools of cre­ation are now being slowly sep­a­rated from the tools of consumption.

It’s an evo­lu­tion in the world of com­put­ers and I would argue that it’s an evo­lu­tion largely due to the fact that Apple par­tic­u­larly despises con­tent cre­ators. A long time ago, the com­pany saw itself as the pro­tec­tor of the con­tent cre­at­ing class but when Adobe started to hedge it out of the pro­fes­sional tools mar­ket­place, Apple decided that it would focus on pro­tect­ing large scale pub­lish­ers and other inter­me­di­aries that focused on dis­tri­b­u­tion of con­tent rather than creation.

First Base: The iTunes store and Music

It all started with the iTunes store. Her­alded as the cre­ator of a whole new indus­try and the sav­ior of the music indus­try, the iTunes store focused on sell­ing music to the masses as long as:

True, over time, a few smaller labels were allowed access but we are yet to see any many artists sell­ing their music directly, bypass­ing the labels alto­gether, through the iTunes store. Apple has decided that artists had to go through estab­lished dis­trib­u­tors, there­fore ensur­ing that the music busi­ness model remains as it has existed instead of lever­ag­ing the power of the inter­net to enable a new creator-powered marketplace.

New com­pa­nies, like Tunecore, have risen to fill the dis­tri­b­u­tion gap but this shows that Apple wants to deal with a few select large com­pa­nies and not a mul­ti­tude of creators.

Ama­zon saw the indie mar­ket­place and the lim­i­ta­tion on # of devices as an unex­ploited mar­ket and opened the MP3 store, which pro­vided music in the MP3 for­mat, allow­ing that music to be played on most music devices. Notice that I didn’t say they pro­vided DRM-free music as they do encrypt an ID in the music to track it, thus ensur­ing that ille­gal copies could be tracked.

Inter­est­ingly, Apple decided to ignore the cre­ative class but, now that Ama­zon is mak­ing good head­ways as the result of its effort, Apple is going on the offen­sive, against Amazon.

Sec­ond Base: Movies & TV shows

Fol­low­ing the same model as it did for music, Apple then intro­duced a model that allowed for TV shows and movies to be pur­chased through the iTunes store. Because of the stran­gle­hold the com­pany has got­ten on the music indus­try and the amount of power the com­pany now has in dic­tat­ing its own terms to that indus­try, exec­u­tives in the TV and movie indus­try have been more care­ful in releas­ing their con­tent to Apple and the company’s offer­ings are still rel­a­tively limited.

Its rental busi­ness is an even smaller sub­set of offer­ing and, once again, is lim­ited to Apple devices: You can watch it using an iPod, iPhone, an AppleTV, or a com­puter using iTunes (and now iPad). In each case, this means using an Apple approved device. I can’t watch a movie I pur­chased from Apple on my network-connected DVD player because Apple won’t license access to its store. But that’s just con­sump­tion and one could say that it’s OK for them to only serve con­tent on their own platform.

Except once again, the con­tent is lim­ited. Once again, Apple has decided that large estab­lished dis­trib­u­tors are the only impor­tant play­ers and thus has pro­vided few solu­tions for indie film mak­ers. This cre­ates an oppor­tu­nity for the likes of Net­flix, Vudu (now part of Wal­mart), Ama­zon, or even Google (through YouTube) to cre­ate a mar­ket­place for indie rentals.

Once again, Apple decided to give the cold shoul­der to cre­ators and focus on the largest dis­trib­u­tors. There’s noth­ing wrong with this but it seems to be show­ing that the mes­sage of Apple as a sup­porter of the cre­at­ing class is not in line with reality.

Third Base: the iPhone App Store

When the iPhone first came out, Apple claimed that the device didn’t need a soft­ware devel­op­ment kit because the web was the devel­op­ment plat­form. This caused some level of con­ster­na­tion among the pun­dit class. It also showed Apple’s dis­re­gard for the inde­pen­dent cre­ators. Here was a new device that, by most mea­sure, could be seen as pretty rev­o­lu­tion­ary and Apple basi­cally told soft­ware devel­op­ers that it would limit access to it.

Of course, Apple even­tu­ally relented and allowed soft­ware devel­op­ers access to the device, as long as they were will­ing to reg­is­ter with Apple and pay $99 a year. This allowed soft­ware cre­ators to cre­ate their own pro­grams and then sub­mit them to the Cuper­tino giant for approval.

Because, you seen, noth­ing goes onto an iPhone or iPad, with­out Apple express approval. The only way to get an appli­ca­tion on there is through the iTunes store and the only way to get into the iTunes store is by going through an approval process that is, at best, obscure, and hope that you will be given the keys to the promised land.

One could take the purist approach and say that devel­op­ers have a choice to not develop for the iPhone. But, in today’s mobile mar­ket, that may be equiv­a­lent to claim­ing that you can run a great soft­ware com­pany in the 1990s with­out hav­ing soft­ware that runs on Win­dows. When a plat­form becomes as dom­i­nant a player as the iPhone is in the mobile mar­ket, ignor­ing the plat­form can have some poten­tial neg­a­tive impact.

Home Run: The iPad

Hav­ing got­ten some level of con­trol over the mobile appli­ca­tion devel­op­ment space, Apple is now going for the whole soft­ware space, in an attempt to cen­tral­ized all soft­ware dis­tri­b­u­tion in its own hands.

The iPad works to that effect on two fronts: first, like the iPhone, appli­ca­tions that are loaded on the iPad have to go through Apple’s approval process before being made avail­able. In other words, it is the posi­tion of “Apple knows best what is good for iPad cus­tomers” and appli­ca­tion that do not meet the Apple seal of approval will not be avail­able. How does one get that seal of approval? Well, that’s unclear. Apple’s pol­icy appears to be able to change quickly, as was the case with “sexy apps” on the iPhone recently. But inter­est­ingly, while apps by small devel­op­ers were banned, apps by larger providers with sim­i­lar type of con­tent were not, prompt­ing John Gru­ber to remark:

I don’t see how it’s any­thing other than hypocrisy to say that Time Warner can have an app show­ing swim­suit mod­els and oth­ers can­not. I totally under­stand Apple’s desire to keep the App Store free of flat-out or even bor­der­line pornog­ra­phy. I do not think it’s wise to remove/ban R-rated con­tent, though — isn’t that exactly what the 17+ rat­ing is for?

But to allow Sports Illus­trated and Play­boy to pub­lish it and oth­ers not? That’s bullshit.

Once again, though, this shows Apple’s dis­re­spect for the inde­pen­dent cre­ators and I sus­pect that the sit­u­a­tion will not improve with the iPad.

More wor­ri­some, how­ever, is what the iPad rep­re­sents to the future of inde­pen­dent cre­ation.

Since the advent of the per­sonal com­puter rev­o­lu­tion, the tools of cre­ation have been avail­able on most com­put­ers. In the very early days (70s and 80s), this meant that com­put­ers even came with basic pro­gram­ming lan­guages acces­si­ble to all com­puter users. As com­put­ers grew more com­plex but eas­ier to use (mov­ing away from the com­mand line to win­dows and mouse dri­ven inter­faces), those pro­gram­ming lan­guages became optional installs. How­ever, along the way, com­put­ers gained some func­tion­al­ity around first writ­ing tools (both the early ver­sions of the mac oper­at­ing sys­tem and win­dows included very basic word edi­tors) and then later around photo, sound and video editing.

True, the tools were basic and some­what lim­ited but, to a large extent, they were good enough for most users to get some basic con­tent cre­ation and edit­ing com­pleted. Today, Apple still bun­dles the iLife prod­uct suite with every mac, allow­ing for pic­ture, video, sound, and web editing.

On the web side, another con­ven­tion was estab­lished in the early 1990s, when the first web browsers included “View Source”, allow­ing any­one to see how a web page was writ­ten, learn from it in the process, and either adapt or evolve the code.

The iPad breaks with that trend.

The iPad is a con­sump­tion tool.

Sure, you can buy iWork from the iTunes store (and it looks nice) but there is no iLife tools avail­able (either bun­dled or as an avail­able extra pur­chase). Why?

I would sus­pect the main rea­son is that Apple sees con­tent cre­ated as the masses as mostly “dirty”, sul­ly­ing the beau­ti­ful hard­ware they have made. And so it now is try­ing to push a new rev­o­lu­tion that will put cre­ation back in the hands of the pro­fes­sional cre­ators and push the masses to that Safari browser icon and the Inter­net. To Apple, only the bright and the beau­ti­ful should be allowed on its hard­ware and, in the approval process to get things on there, along with the iTunes store (and iBooks store) as the only way to get con­tent on there, it now has the level of con­trol it wants to ensure that the masses are rel­e­gated to the internet.

To Apple, Google can have the Inter­net. Apple’s devices will have browsers on them because they need to from a com­pet­i­tive stand­point but, if it were up to Steve Jobs, I’m sure that would be the first app to go.

Update: Cory Doc­torow chimes in.

Originally published on April 2, 2010 in Business, Media, Technology . You may find related thoughts pieces under the following terms: , , ,

  • http://www.paulcampy.com Paul Campy

    I think you’re absolutely right to draw the dis­tinc­tion of con­sump­tion from cre­ation; the iPad is a con­sumer device to con­sume con­tent, whether it be the web, books or music and video. Despite the apps that will flock to the plat­form, it truly is a new type of device, not a replace­ment for a net or notebook.

    While I may be a fully paid-up Apple fan­boy (in the inter­est of full dis­clo­sure!), I could under­stand the closed plat­form jus­ti­fi­ca­tion on the iPhone plat­form. It pro­tected the core *con­sumer* expe­ri­ence and func­tion of own­ing a mobile, i.e. that of mak­ing calls with­out some rogue app break­ing such func­tion­al­ity or unduly impact­ing the net­work (AT&T and O2 have enough trou­ble of their own mak­ing). The iPad though could have gone either way — a stripped down ‘desk­top’ OS X or a bulked up iPhone Mac OS X — and, not being a phone device, could have been afforded a tad more plat­form freedom.

    Apple may, in my opin­ion, make the finest com­puter equip­ment in the world; it’s clear though that the iPhone and iPad lines are not exten­sions of that com­puter her­itage, only lever­age it; this is Apple the con­sumer elec­tron­ics company.

  • http://www.tnl.net/blog/ Tris­tan Louis

    Paul: Apple as the con­sumer elec­tronic com­pany. you really encap­su­lated the approach bril­liantly. And that’s part of my worry. Because Apple is such thought leader in our indus­try, will it lead the indus­try AWAY from open­ness and user con­trol towards a land where we will choose between Apple devices con­nected to an Apple store or Microsoft devices con­nected to a Microsoft store or Google devices con­nected to a Google store.

    Where does that leave the inde­pen­dents and where does that leave inno­va­tion that doesn’t fit the “store” mold?

  • Pingback: Will the iPad Cause the End of Innovation? - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

  • http://www.paulcampy.com Paul Campy

    Alas, I think it leaves inde­pen­dent inno­va­tion in the hands of Android, pro­vided it doesn’t become a purely Google chan­nel. And I say ‘alas’, as I think it’s to the detri­ment of the Apple plat­form and to inno­va­tion in general.

  • Noibs

    I think you totally nailed it. I’ve been an Apple fan­boy since the ’84 Mac; how­ever, it’s only a mat­ter of time until I go in the direc­tion of Ubuntu or Mint Linux. The rea­sons are the ones you out­lined in your excel­lent piece.

  • http://www.tnl.net/blog/ Tris­tan Louis

    My main con­cern about this is because Apple designs beau­ti­ful prod­uct and has, when it was an under­dog, largely been a force for good in our indus­try. Now that it turns, who will replace them? Google (with Android and Chrome OS)? If so, we will end up with prod­ucts that are a lit­tle more bor­ing look­ing as Google is not really that focused on the design (in the sense of mak­ing things look really slick) as Apple is. They’re apps are util­i­tar­ian but nobody would ever accuse them of being beautiful.

    Microsoft may actu­ally be our next best hope if the Xbox/series 7 team gets to move its DNA across the rest of the organization.

    I wish the Unix crowd would find some friends in the UX crowd and we might get some­thing open source but I’m not hold­ing my breath.

    So, from the con­sumer end, I sus­pect that, sadly, Apple will be the lead and that it may end up mov­ing our whole world to be a lit­tle more closed and a lit­tle more dif­fi­cult for cre­ators. I wish that weren’t the case but I fear it might be.

  • Eugene

    My God this is non­sense. The iPad is designed as a device for con­sump­tions mainly ( although iWork is not con­sump­tion). It does how­ever, con­nect to the Mac where you can pro­gram for the device. Sim­i­larly the X-Box ( or Wii) or most other con­sumer devices are for con­sump­tion and you cre­ate con­tent elsewhere.

    Since the Mac, nor Win­dows, nor Linux are going away the hys­te­ria is ridiculous.The iPad is a par­al­lel com­put­ing device, pri­mar­ily geared at con­sumers and not at all geared for pro­gram­mers to pro­gram on it ( rather– for it)

    This meme — inde­pen­dents are get­ting screwed — is not just wrong it is the exact oppo­site of the truth. Of the more than 150K appli­ca­tions writ­ten for the iPhone since it’s incep­tion most have been writ­ten by inde­pen­dents ( includ­ing myself) and many by peo­ple who never coded Objec­tive C before. The iPhone cre­ated a whole new mar­ket for inde­pen­dents, not all of whom are mak­ing money, but most of whom are enjoy­ing the expe­ri­ence ( and as the Mar­ket con­sol­i­dates we will be employ­able as iPad or iPhone devs for larger organisations).

    In fact, no devel­oper worth his salt cares about the “con­trol” that Apple has over the app store. Spend­ing two min­utes on an appli­ca­tion which shows a slide show of mod­els in biki­nis does not impress me as a great tech­ni­cal chal­lenge, and what those of us who actu­ally pro­gram decent soft­ware for the device actu­ally feel ( and I make my liv­ing from this) — is that the Apple store should be more con­trol­ling, not less. That is what all the devel­oper forums say. The other meme — the angry ” I wrote ten lines of code and added girls with big boobs” devel­oper — well he gets all the news but on actual devel­oper forums, we rejoice. Kick more of them out. Kick out the iFart apps, too. ( Here is hop­ing the iPad has bet­ter control).

    None of gate-keeping is new, and Google con­trol the Android store as well.

    About Android: nobody cares. Indies dont make money from the “free as in beer” crowd. Android has no mon­e­ti­z­able base. It is slightly catch­ing up on the iPhone in the US because Apple have not released a new model iPhone, and have reached their capac­ity with AT&T. How­ever it’s appli­ca­tions sales are clearly abysmal ( quick: name a inde­pen­dent devel­oper who has got­ten rich — there were tens of such sto­ries within a few months of the release of the iPhone SDK)

    In a few months when Apple moves to the 4G and expands to other car­ri­ers the game is over for that platform.

    Not that we care any­way. i work on and con­tribute to a games engine ported to the iPhone 2 years ago. There is nobody who cares about port­ing it to Android, because there is no money to be made.

    The only peo­ple who care about this pseduo-openness are the “power-users”, not the real geeks. We geeks will jail break any­way, if we need to, or down­load a ter­mi­nal app and use the iPad like a Unix device. Which it is.

    Most peo­ple will, how­ever, use it as a con­sumer device, we can pro­duce for it else­where, the Mac is set up to do exactly that. Thats what xCode is for. The rest is hand waving.

  • http://BlueWorldStudios.com E.J.

    The fun­da­men­tal prob­lem nobody likes to address is that with­out a fil­ter, the garbage over­whelms the valu­able. It hap­pens any­where that any­body can par­tic­i­pate regard­less of qual­i­fi­ca­tion or skill. With­out it, Indie any­thing, music, lit, art, blogs, com­ments, or apps, become so volu­mi­nous and over­whelm­ing that find­ing the good isn’t worth weed­ing through the garbage.

    Any app store, for any plat­form, needs some level of fil­tra­tion or it will col­lapse under the weight of it’s own crap. In order for Android’s app store to be suc­cess­ful in the long run, it’s going to need a fil­ter of some kind. It will be inter­est­ing to see the com­plaints once it’s put in place.

  • http://www.tnl.net/blog/ Tris­tan Louis

    Eugene,

    Did you actu­ally read the post? I fully agree with you that the iPad is designed as a device for con­sump­tion (in fact, it’s even high­lighted in my post) and that is the trend that wor­ries me. Apple is a thought leader in the com­put­ing indus­try and, as such, is in a fairly unique posi­tion to influ­ence what oth­ers might do. To move to a space where they get more and more restric­tive and work to be the only fun­nel, while at the same time tak­ing away tools of cre­ation, seems that they have decided that cre­ation by the masses is not some­thing they want to encour­age, there­fore revers­ing the trends estab­lished long ago in the early days of the per­sonal computer.

    If you want com­put­ers to be more like your tele­vi­sion or more like a radio, that’s fine. My con­cern is that, for many years, com­put­ers have been tools to encour­age cre­ative involve­ment, not pas­sive involve­ment and, as such, I’m con­cerned with the direc­tion Apple is try­ing to take our indus­try in.

    My sec­ond point (and the one you call bull­shit) is that inde­pen­dent are get­ting squeezed. As you right­fully say, not all are mak­ing money but they might have a chance get­ting employed by large firms in the future. If that’s the case, it’s even sad­der to me: hav­ing worked both as a startup entre­pre­neur (2 IPOs, 2 sales, 1 fail­ure) and for large cor­po­ra­tions, I can tell you that it is eas­ier to inno­vate in a startup envi­ron­ment than it is in a large orga­ni­za­tion one. If the future of most inde­pen­dent iphone pro­gram­mers is to go work for large firms, then inno­va­tion on the iphone will wither.

    On Apple being more con­trol­ling, are you actu­ally say­ing that most devel­op­ers believe that Apple should have a more restric­tive SDK? Is it OK, in your view (and that of the devel­op­ers you talk to), that Apple can dic­tate if your app should use a 3G net­work or Wifi (exam­ple: Skype, Sling Player)? Is it OK, in your view (and that of the devel­op­ers you talk to) for Apple to decide that, if your prod­uct repro­duces func­tion­al­ity that is too close to what they offer­the prod­uct shouldn’t exist (exam­ple: pod­caster) ? Is it OK, in your view (and that of the devel­op­ers you talk to), that Apple can dic­tate how your app uses net­work resources (for exam­ple, net­share or wifi stum­bler) ? To me, it’s not and that’s why I have a jail­bro­ken (and unlocked) iphone but I ques­tion whether it should be fine for most con­sumers. Most con­sumers don’t want to void their war­ranty and, by jail­break­ing your phone, you actu­ally do so.

    Last but not least, on Android. If nobody cares, why is Android quickly becom­ing the sec­ond largest mobile OS for smart phones? Why is it about to over­take the iphone in terms of num­ber of units in cir­cu­la­tion? If nobody cares, why are com­pa­nies like face­book devel­op­ing apps for it? Do not con­fuse cool­ness fac­tor with rev­enue potential.

  • http://www.tnl.net/blog/ Tris­tan Louis

    E.J.

    The fil­ter prob­lem is an inter­est­ing one but how did you get to this site? You had to pick this post out of hun­dreds or thou­sands of blog posts. Did you go through an “approved inter­net sites” list?

    I’d war­rant you haven’t.

    As far as app stores col­laps­ing under a weight of crap, is that what hap­pened to the soft­ware indus­try (and soft­ware for win­dows or mac (or even linux) or hasn’t it been more of a case of the good stuff actu­ally ris­ing to the top, to be used by most?

  • Eugene

    We seem to be argu­ing past each other.

    1) The iPad is a con­sumer device for con­sum­ing “stuff”. If it were more restric­tive ( i.e. books only) nobody would care that you could not pro­duce con­tent ( i.e. a book) on it. Nobody cares with the Kin­dle. Because you can do more on the iPad, it is seen as a com­puter, but it isn’t. No more than a Kin­dle is. No more than an X-Box is. Or a toaster with a chip. About which, few com­plaints. The Mac is still around. Go wild. ( And where are the arti­cles on the restric­tive­ness of the X-Box?)

    2) The inde­pen­dent com­mu­nity is con­sol­i­dat­ing not because of the APp Store restric­tive poli­cies but because there is so lit­tle con­trol than peo­ple can­not make enough money, or to com­pete on mar­ket­ing with the big­ger play­ers. This always hap­pens when indus­tries mature. What hap­pened in the last 2 years was like the first 2–5 years of the PC rev­o­lu­tion — run by hob­by­ists — and it always hap­pens. Apps stores restric­tive prac­tices are not rel­e­vant. But let me re-iterate, what hap­pened here was a huge increase in indie access to mobile soft­ware, not the opposite.

    3) i dont care about any of the restric­tions you men­tion, most of which have to do with net­work providers — what is hap­pen­ing here is what will hap­pen on any mobile, and which has hap­pened on all mobile plat­forms. Net­work resources are finite and a mobile device has to be care­ful about how it uses or abuses the net­work — this is unlike the inter­net which can­not be brought down. Not only was this com­mon to all mobile devices prior to the iPhone ( and again no angry arti­cles about cen­sor­ship), it was true after the iPhone release until Android came along — since when it has become an issue; and even there Gog­gle have pulled apps they have seen as com­pro­mis­ing the net­work. The only thing to see here is anti-Apple posturing.

    4) “Last but not least, on Android. If nobody cares, why is Android quickly becom­ing the sec­ond largest mobile OS for smart phones? ”

    Is it? any­thing increas­ing from a small base will seem to be accel­er­at­ing. You can­not extrapoloate from recent Android growth to any­thing else. The Android mar­ket has increased at a time when Apple — and I have said this — have not released any­thing recently, and after the release of the Droid and Nexus. That’s what hap­pens. For exam­ple: have a 1st gen iPhone, but intend to upgrade this year, but will only do so when the 4G comes out. Also what is cur­tail­ing the iPhone’s growth in the US is AT&T. That too will pass. The pent up demand is huge. Android will appeal to geeks — pos­si­bly 10% of the smart­phone mar­ket ( maybe 1–4% of the entire mar­ket), and will peak and plateau or fall.

    And lets remem­ber that most of these geeks poo-pooed the whole touch screen, multi-touch idea at the start, hug­ging their black­ber­ries (with it’s con­trolled mar­ket) — now they are con­verted to Anything-But-Apple, based on what­ever spu­ri­ous rea­son they want. Good for them, I dont care.

    But I was talk­ing about the mar­ket for devel­op­ers. What can we sell to the free as in beer crowd. Noth­ing. I can make a liv­ing on the iPhone, and the iPad and I have no inter­est in giv­ing away work for free to the angry open source com­mu­nity who like open stuff. Open is often syn­ony­mous with free. Free as in cheap. Free( often) as in theft.

  • http://www.tnl.net/blog/ Tris­tan Louis

    Eugene,

    Some very inter­est­ing points in your rebut­tal so thanks for keep­ing the dia­logue going.

    1) My con­cern is more along the lines of where Apple is headed. With the suc­cess of the iPod and iPhone (and I would assume, pend­ing suc­cess of the iPad), Apple’s focus seems to increas­ingly be on closed con­sumer elec­tron­ics sys­tem. Most of the cur­rent Mac lines, as they stands, are actu­ally over­due for a refresh. Note also that, along the way, the mac­book lines have started adopt­ing more ipod/iphone-like fea­tures like non-removable bat­ter­ies. My con­cern is that Apple is now more inter­ested in being a con­sumer elec­tron­ics com­pany than a com­puter one and I could see a future (5–10 years out) where the com­pany might declare that they are dis­con­tin­u­ing the mac line alto­gether. Remem­ber that, in his pre­sen­ta­tion, Jobs was clear that he was look­ing for the iPad to be an even­tual replace­ment for most com­put­ers and that’s where my first beef is: if Apple sees the iPad (and its suc­ces­sors) as the log­i­cal line of demar­ca­tion, we will see com­put­ers like the rel­a­tively cheap mac­book being dis­con­tin­ued and prod­ucts like the mac­book mov­ing up in price as they become “pro­fes­sional” tools.

    And because Apple is really the counter-weight to Microsoft, the lack of com­pe­ti­tion will even­tu­ally mean that the com­puter indus­try could move in the direc­tion of see­ing itself as a tool for a mar­ket of pro­fes­sional, not a mass market.

    2) It is true that con­sol­i­da­tion has hap­pened in pre­vi­ous cycles but it’s always been aug­mented with new play­ers enter­ing the mar­ket (and no sin­gle player has man­aged to estab­lish dom­i­na­tion for more than a decade). So increased con­sol­i­da­tion in the hand of a few incum­bents is actu­ally part of my con­cern. Remem­ber that if the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion around iPhones/iPads were to involve Microsoft instead of Apple, peo­ple would scream about monop­o­lies. Just because the new monop­oly is being built by Apple does not, in my view, make it right. In fact, I would ven­ture that, from the 2010 van­tage point, I’d rather have that kind of con­sol­i­da­tion hap­pen in Microsoft’s hands because of its past expe­ri­ence at being branded monopolist.

    I’ll grant you that the app store has been a boon to some inde­pen­dent devel­op­ers but I worry that Apple will slowly stran­gle that market.

    3) Just because the mar­ket was closed before Apple entered it does not make clos­ing up the mar­ket again jus­ti­fi­able. It is true that Apple did man­age to wres­tle away con­trol of the mobile deck from the telco car­ri­ers and we all have to be thank­ful for that. My con­cern here is that, hav­ing opened up the mar­ket and prof­ited from that effort, Apple is now look­ing to close it up again when it doesn’t ben­e­fit Apple. Once again, on a trend­line, this could mean that the time of open­ness pre­sented here is just a blip and we could end up with a mar­ket that’s as closed as it used to be, except we now have to ask Apple for per­mis­sion to put things on the deck instead of the tel­cos. That, in my view, does not fit the def­i­n­i­tion of progress :)

    The straw­man of net­work resources being finite is noth­ing more than that. Remem­ber that net­work resource, whether mobile or not, are always finite. It is as true of the inter­net as it is of any net­work and, in the 1990s, the argu­ment by the tel­cos was that the inter­net would crash if more restric­tions were not being put in place in terms of net­work shap­ing. A strong fight ensued and today, we still enjoy a rel­a­tively restric­tion free inter­net which, for some odd rea­son, hasn’t col­lapsed even though net­work traf­fic as increased many­fold. The argu­ments being made about mobile net­work band­width being finite are sim­i­lar today. Remem­ber that a lot of phone traf­fic is pack­e­tized and so the dif­fer­ence between wire­less and land­line based net­works is decreas­ing quickly. The big dif­fer­ence that exist today is sim­i­lar to what hap­pened about a decade ago as more con­sumers started to use broad­band inter­net lines. The thing is that, back then, unlike now, the tel­cos and cable com­pa­nies over­built their net­works, which allowed them to cope with the demand. Today, in the mobile space, the tel­cos over­promised and under­de­liv­ered. So putting restric­tions on apps, in my view, is not justifiable.

    Once again, here, my con­cern is more on a trend­line stand­point. Restric­tive SDKs tend to move in the direc­tion of being more restric­tive, not more open. So I worry about what the next set of restric­tions could be and the fact that we are giv­ing tremen­dous power to a sin­gle com­pany with­out hav­ing any bal­ance (unless Android or WinMo 7 become that balance).

    4) Android is mak­ing sig­nif­i­cant gains in a num­ber of are­nas (see here and here for exam­ples). It’s not just geeky techy (in fact, I’ve been sur­prised by the num­ber of non-techies I’ve seen with Android phones lately). I sus­pect the gains are first due to the fact that android devices are avail­able from more car­ri­ers so Ver­i­zon users, T-Mobile users, and Sprint users (in the US) are mov­ing in that direc­tion since they can’t get iPhones from their car­rier. The dynam­ics will be very inter­est­ing if Apple does indeed start offer­ing a CDMA phone.

    The other thing that has been sur­pris­ing to me is actu­ally the level of inter­est among devel­op­ers in the android plat­form. Remem­ber that, for a lot of peo­ple, it’s not an either/or but a develop the app for iphone and if it works, port to android. From that stand­point, it’s becom­ing an inter­est­ing trend worth watch­ing. I don’t know if you’re cor­rect in your assump­tion that the android and open source crowd are one and the same (I sus­pect too much of the open source crowd still look to LiMo as their sav­ior and con­sid­ers Google evil in the same way some may con­sider Apple evil) but I sus­pect that, over the next year or so, you’re going to see more of the devel­op­ment com­mu­nity move to Android as an alter­na­tive or com­ple­ment to Apple’s platform.