Steven Frank puts into words what we’ve all been feeling for almost a year:
It continues to kill me, seeing that iPhone apps are still getting rejected for ridiculous reasons.
The Cocoa Touch platform is so great, and this approval nonsense is so absurd that it’s hard for me to reconcile.
Almost a year now, and Apple still has a stranglehold on the platform. I’m an adult, and I am quite sure most iPhone owners are adults, but apparently there still needs to be someone who decides that I can’t use anything that has as much as a nipple in it on my phone. In the mean time, people I know that aren’t very tech-savvy have heard about the news buzz over strange App Store screwups and get completely turned off.
I’m not afraid of competition to the iPhone. I’d be really happy with a good competitor to keep Apple on its toes. I’m much more afraid, however, that something that is qualitatively far worse (but ‘good enough’) than the iPhone platform comes along and wins out because it’s perceived as being more open and people feel like they can do with it what they want. Which may be some really stupid stuff that Apple doesn’t allow on their store. The platform just needs to be ‘good enough’ and not buried in critical news coverage.
Sounds a bit like the old Mac vs. IBM PC battle for supremacy, doesn’t it? We all know how that one ended.