Free Market App Store
Wil Shipley, the lead developer behind Delicious Library, offers his thoughts on the state of the iPhone App Store. Shipley’s thesis boils down to this: Apple should allow any and every app into the App store that isn’t explicitly harmful to users and drop all the ‘quality control’ affectations. He supports this claim with a myriad of arguments, but the most important one involves Apple’s current path towards monopolistic behavior. After denying distribution to two applications recently (Podcaster and MailWrangler) because they ‘duplicate’ functionality already found in iTunes and Mail (in other words, they are direct competition for Apple itself), Shipley sees Apple on a slippery slope that culminates in monopoly. From the article:
I have to be clear: it simply will not stand for Apple to prevent applications on the iPhone from competing with Apple’s own applications…This kind of behavior is illegal when you hit a certain point in market saturation for your product; Microsoft was slapped for it constantly in the late ’80s. If the iPhone is the success Apple thinks it will be, they will find themselves the target of a huge class-action lawsuit.
Undoubted, Shipley hits the nail on the head here.
