1 Aug 2009 kr   » (Journeyer)

Upset at Apple?

Steven Frank has a post about Apple’s iPhone app store policies (or lack thereof).

“I’m furious with Apple and AT&T right now, with regard to the iPhone.”

Really? Dude, what did you expect? It’s Apple.

“The boat may turn slowly, but nothing before has ever suggested to me that Apple are actively malicious.”

No, actually, Apple has a long history of active maliciousness.

But there is hope for the future. The Palm Pre (and to some extent, Android) is set to bring serious competition. When that happens, Apple will be forced to adopt rational policies or lose their developers, followed by their users.

Why expect this? Compared to the iPhone, the Pre currently has essentially three disadvantages, all of which will probably disappear over time, and one big advantage, which will never go away.

Pre’s Disadvantages:

  1. Inferior design. Debatable, and certainly fixable.
  2. Fewer (good) apps. Of course. iPhone has a two-year head start. But this will reverse, because of the advantage below.
  3. Worse network coverage. Sprint < AT&T; Verizon > AT&T. Just wait six months.

Pre’s Advantage:

  1. Javascript. Don’t underestimate the effect of millions of brilliant, hungry web programmers and designers who will never write a line of Objective-C in their lives.

    The iPhone can never overcome this without becoming a Pre clone, and Apple is too proud to do that. I think. Actually, I’m not so sure about this last statement. Apple will probably just copy the Pre and then pretend like they invented HTML-CSS-Javascript-based phone apps.

Syndicated 2009-07-31 07:00:00 from Keith Rarick

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