Cautionary Behaviour from Apple

APPLE HAS CHOSEN ONE of the most disheartening approaches for dealing with developers and I'm throttling back my iTunes purchases as a result. I already make most of my book purchases at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. I can get every piece of music I've ever needed from several sources but they're not as impulsive as iTunes. I'm motivated to change my consumer preferences because of changes in the terms and conditions of the new iPhone 4.0 SDK language. If you use the iPhone 4.0 SDK, you cannot program in any non-Apple-approved languages or you violate your terms as an Apple Application Developer. I don't think this is a positive step for Apple because it totally abuses developer relationships. Part of the iPhone success story is its glorious number of applications. Developers make applications and some developers I know are switching gears in order to produce high quality Android apps over iPhone apps.

If this was a battle for product design mastery, Apple would win. I think the convergent phone market space isn't going to be dominated by the most beautiful user interface. At the very top of the smartphone market, the biggest slice of the pie will be taken by the manufacturer who can provide the best functionality. To some customers, functionality is all about industrial design. To many others, functionality means a phone with voice that works all the time, an operating system that's stable, an over-the-air upgrade capability for firmware and applications. You won't find all those functions in a typical iPhone but if you've bought the latest version, you're probably happy with the user experience. And you might not miss anything because iPhone apps serve your every need.

Apple's latest restrictions against developers goes well beyond Steve Jobs' disdain for Flash. Steve Jobs won't allow applications into Apple's marketplace solely because of what language was originally used to create the apps. This exerts tyrannical control over developers. It reduces developers to pawns in Apple's hate campaign against Adobe.

In the meantime, I'm off to update my SonyEricsson X10 by finding apps that make my day go faster.

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Lee Brimelow -- "Apple slaps developers in the face" on the Flash Blog, 9 April 2010.

Eric Schonfeld -- "Is Steve Jobs ignoring history or trying to rewrite it?" on TechCrunch, 9 April 2010.

Yesterday: "Market shares for phones" on InsideView.ie.

Jeffrey Young and William Simon -- iCon ISBN 0471720836

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