Open vs. Proprietary Platforms
There’s been a lot of talk lately about proprietary platforms. Apple has been rejecting apps left and right due to various reasons. For example, they rejected the Google Voice app using their generic “duplicates iPhone features” reasoning. Isn’t that kind of reasoning grounds for an antitrust case? They also rejected a dictionary app for potentially bad words! Someone think of the children!
While I think Apple deserves some credit for popularizing the whole app store notion, they also kind of suck for holding such an iron grip on it. It’s nice to find apps in the store without having a third party directory or searching for apps all over the mobile web. But it sucks when honest developers get screwed because of totalitarian control.
I wonder if there can’t be a nice, happy medium. Maybe an app store combined with a way to legally (without jailbreaking) install apps via a third party. For now, the iPhone’s App Store is great for customers, but I have a feeling that abused developers will eventually learn their lesson and go elsewhere.
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I definitely think there is a viable happy medium. Although, I am a biased FLOSS advocate that believes in the power of giving people choice. The example I always think of when thinking of app stores is software repositories in the linux world (using apt, yum, emerge, etc). There are TONS of duplicate applications available that do the same thing; some with few bugs, some with tons. You know what though, everyone tends to go for the higher quality software because of word-of-mouth and rating systems. I am totally a believer that collaborative filtering is a sufficient means to bring the “worthy” applications to the top and the unworthy/crap/spam applications to the bottom. It just means giving the power back to the user instead of the faceless gatekeepers of some application store. Ok, enough ranting on a topic you already know my opinions about 😉
That’s a good point, Greg. I think another awesome thingy like that is CPAN for Perl. At least, I think that’s how it works…