Why the Apple App Store is Worthless.

Everyone from Dave Winer to Paul Kafasis to Harry McCracken is weighing in on how Apple has just screwed the pooch with their App Store.

Long story short, an application named PodCaster for the iPhone, which allows you to grab new podcasts live from the iPhone without using iTunes, was rejected by Apple on the grounds that, “it duplicates the functionality of the Podcast section of iTunes.”

Needless to say, it didn’t take long for the anger over this to spread through the “blogosphere”. (There needs to be a new word for that…)

It’s gotten so bad that Fraser Speirs, author of Exposure (a flickr client for the iPhone), is refusing to write another app for the iPhone with the App Store in its current state.

The outrage is palpable:

You have to wonder if Apple wants the App Store to be a museum of poorly-designed nibware written by dilettante Mac OS X/iPhone OS switcher-developers and hobbyist students. — Fraser Speirs

Consider this possibility. Next year Apple announces an app that does what your previously authorized iPhone app does. You have competition, so another competitor, even if it is the platform vendor, isn’t that big a deal, right? Well what if they de-authorize your app because it duplicates functionality of theirs? Think you could live with that? — Dave Winer

Exactly right. If you only find out at the end of the development process that your app has been rejected — not for a technical problem that you can address but because Apple deems the entire concept to be out of bounds — then who is going to put serious time and talent into an iPhone app? — John Gruber

Way back when, if software distribution for the Mac had been handled via a Mac App Store with a don’t-duplicate-Apple-products policy, Photoshop might have been refused distribution on the grounds that it was too similar to MacPaint. A Mac platform that hadn’t gotten Photoshop might well have been a Mac platform that died some time in the mid-1990s or so. — Harry McCracken

Here, however, Apple has gone too far. Rejecting an application because it might compete with Apple is simply indefensible. There’s so much wrong with it that I’m not even sure where to start. — Paul Kafasis

Apple had nothing in the terms prohibiting developers from duplicating features currently available on desktop application. I followed all the guidelines and made sure everything is in the correct place. — Almerica

Dave is absolutely correct, it’s not a platform if you need approval of the vendor to ship your application. Just imagine what would have happened to Windows if Microsoft had required that they approve each & every application before it can be distributed? Or on a larger scale, imagine what would have happened to the internet as a whole or the web if you needed approval to develop for it?

Ultimately, this is only going to encourage further jailbreaking. Apple developed an incredible device, but placing such restrictions on it will only lead to users breaking those restrictions, continuing the cat & mouse game Apple has with firmware upgrades.

At this point, development for the iPhone is becoming a wholly unreliable prospect. It simply is not worth the time or energy to write software for it, particularly if at any time, Apple can shut you down when they decide to incorporate your application’s functionality into iTunes.