Apple relaxing iPhone rules, developers winning big
Sure, Steve Jobs is taking a leave of absence - perhaps permanently. But it's in some unusual strategic decisions that Apple's made recently that you can see Apple changing even more, argues Alex Kidman.
Apple is infamous for being tight-lipped when it wants to be (and bombastic when it feels it's got something to say), controlling (many would say dictatorial) when it comes to releasing information, and overall presenting a very strong "big brother" image when it comes to its products and services.
Nowhere has that been more evident than with the iPhone and its successor, the iPhone 3G.
Sure, the hackers got into the original iPhone with predictable speed, and a grey market industry emerged for installer apps, which led Apple into an arms race to lock the system down; it's an arms race it's still in -- seemingly without an actual victory point in sight -- but it also allowed the company to have even more apps ready when the 3G model launched; quite a number of illicit iPhone installer Apps made their way into the App store with surprising speed.
What didn't, initially make it into the App store was anything Apple didn't approve of. Now, without a crystal ball and/or some very well hidden cameras in strategic Cupertino locations, it's impossible to know how many applications were in fact knocked back, but very quickly some ground rules emerged.
Apple blocked the infamous "I Am Rich" application, which simply displayed a ruby and cost a sweet (or painful) US$1,000 along the way. Nullriver's Netshare -- which allowed tethering of an iPhone to a PC in a modem capacity -- was initially allowed in the US store, and then swiftly removed, never to be seen again.
Rude applications were blocked, as were those that duplicated something that Apple already did, such as web browsing or podcast management. Not a lot of fun for developers, but very much in the classic Apple "control" mould.
Recently, though, it seems as though things have changed at Apple, or at least the rules have been relaxed.
Rude applications have passed through without comment where previously developers had complained that they were blocked.
Most famously, developer Joel Comm, behind (pun not intended) the rather obviously named iFart application -- estimates he made more than US$27,000 in a single day from the application.
That's a lot of gas, and, of course with Apple's 30% App store cut, they're also smiling all the way to the bank. Presumably with clothes pegs on their noses, but I digress into the puerile.
Even locally, the slightly-iffy App store market has seen some (ahem) growth, with Australian-developed "Wobble", an application that lets you add wobbling movement to any region of a photo.
I'll let you work out the potential there, but again in business terms it's done well; the author told Mactalk.com.au that it had sold something in the region of 7,500 copies within its first week. Not bad for an application that's likely to only appeal to 50% of the population, at best.
Lest you think this blog's getting a touch too puerile, the App store's even expanded to take on the web browser market.
That's genuinely core iPhone 3G territory; you might be able to switch around where Safari sits, but it's resolutely there, and it's exactly the kind of "duplicating functionality" type of service that Apple would have, in the past, blocked entirely.
I can't say for sure that punters will be lining up around the block to pay for duplicate functionality -- at the time of writing, the only free browsing application, Edge Browser wasn't in the Australian iTunes Store -- but it's certainly a big reversal of the previous Apple position on such things.
It's not all free sailing, sadly -- there's no sign of NullRiver's iPhone tethering application Netshare re-appearing on the App store any time soon.
Oddly, a search within iTunes for Netshare only brings up a track from an artist called "Nocturnal Emissions"... which brings us back to farting again.
Just when I thought we were escaping the puerile stuff...
Other Blog Entries written by Alex Kidman:
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