Digital Mutterings

Over the past week I have been watching the on going saga of the Commodore 64 emulator for the iPhone. Apple at first rejected the app, then approved it, now it’s been pulled from the store, because the developer did not fully disable the BASIC interpreter, which I find to be a silly reason. Apple seems to be all over the place in regards to what’s acceptable in the app store, and what’s not, and changes the rules on the fly.

It’s no secret that Steve Jobs is a control freak, which can be a double edged sword, but I think now it’s starting to become, or already is a ongoing problem for developers. Now if I were a developer I would have to consider if trying to guess what the app store folks are thinking is more trouble than it’s worth. I also think, especially in the case of the Google Voice app rejection, it’s also hurting the customer. In the Google case Apple says that Google’s app duplicates already existing features, which in my opinion is a crock, there are a number of apps in the store that do that. The developers are between a rock, and a hard place, in that the Apple app store is the Smartphone version of Wal-Mart, and you have to play by their rules.

Now all this got me to thinking, what if the developers were to just stop, stop creating new apps, and stop updating existing ones, and tell Apple, until you come up with some guidelines that are written in stone, and make sense, do not expect to see any submissions from us. Now of course this will really tick Steve off, but I think the developers would be in the better position of the two, unless Steve just decided to close, or suspend the app store. The bottom line is that Apple needs to come up with a happy medium where, they can exercise some type of quality control, and yet let the customers decide if a app sinks, or swims by voting with their dollars, and the developers don’t have to have ESP to figure out what Apple is thinking at any giving moment. The current situation not only ends up hurting the customers, but also opens the door for someone with a more open platform to come in and try to steal the show, and some developers may decide to move to other platforms, which not only hurts Apple but also the consumer.

On a side note, it was nice to see Steve Jobs back in the saddle at the recent iPod event on 9/9/09.