First and foremost, my apologies to all the readers of my blog, as I haven’t been able to write much at all lately… I’ve been so busy at work, literally ->0 time to write/blog.

(well, I’ve been busy writing other kinds of stuff — business cases and new products requirements and marketing and sales and pricing stuff; but I digress)

A lot of mobility-related things have been happening, from Augmented Reality to other cool stuff, but allow me to briefly focus (rant) on one aspect that bugs me the most at this age of “openness”: Apple’s angle and attitude w.r.t. iPhone/App Store and its effect on (against) the developer community. For a good example of what I’m talking about go read the blog post There’s No App for That – the nightmare experiences by iPhone app developer Riverturn (I know Kevin Duerr indirectly through a good friend of mine). Also read about Riverturn’s case at Mac|Life – Apple’s FCC Response Infuriates Google Voice App Developer.

I stick by what I said back on July when I wrote on Twitter:

“Google Voice was removed as it “duplicates features that come with the iPhone”. That’s anti-competitive, unlawful and will bite Apple later”…

(First it was Google Voice, then Riverturn’s VoiceCentral application)

A couple of days later, the FCC started some inquiries on the matter and then Apple officially responded to the FCC inquiries.

In my opinion, Apple with its policies, selective rejections and lack of explanations on why the applications are being rejected (leaving developers with no route to re-enter the app market and leaving their users/subscribers unhappy potentially resulting on not returning back) Apple is clearly behaving like a “monopolist”.

And what I find ironic is that Apple (a god when it comes to design) is wrapping “policy” around “design” and making design (and thus policy) the reason for rejections; here design is the iPhone’s “distinctive user experience”.

But what Apple is conveniently ignoring is that 3rd-party developers, even the ones who are competitors are the ones who have made the iPhone successful — all you have to do is watch the iPhone TV commercials; it is about the applications.

It is about the E C O S Y S T E M — don’t screw with it!

Related to this see:

ceo