It doesn’t really matter whether it is Android’s growth or the FTC’s investigation, but Apple has officially rescinded some of the most onerous restrictions on developers for iOS by allowing third party tools. This is an important change from a developer perspective as it makes cross platform development easier. Not just across mobile devices, but also across the web and mobile (of course HTML5 pushes in that direction as well).
Just as interesting though is the increased transparency that Apple is now providing on its store review guidelines. Engadget has a terrific summary with a link to the actual PDF. Apple’s model for the app store still has many elements of a more traditional publishing model. Apple clearly feels that they need to curate to some degree what’s in the store (“no more fart apps”). But why? What is wrong with letting someone create another fart app? Absolutely nothing, as far as I can tell.
I believe that ultimately an open publishing system for apps will win out over a closed one. That system, however, needs to crack the nut on making it easy to find the best app(s) for a given purpose without running across a lot of garbage along the way. Apple is a far way from this. The other day I was looking for a calculator for the iPad for my kids to use and had to resort to google as the App Store experience was entirely broken.
