Not Getting It at Techcrunch

Dan Kimmerling, over on TechCrunch, advises would-be iPhone developers to sit down, shut up, and learn to live with Apple's rules. In doing so, he manages to completely miss the main point that people have been complaining about.

Writing software is work. Sure, people do it for fun, but people split logs for fun, too. In any case, people do this sort of thing expecting a return on their investment of time and effort. The problem that Apple has created is that developers are in the position of having to make the entirety of their investment up front--thinking up and developing an application--and only then can they submit it to the iTunes Apps Store and find out whether they're going to be allowed to sell it or not.

The problem here is the complete lack of anything like a free marketplace. Apple not only owns the grocery store here, they own your pots, pans, sink, refrigerator and kitchen stove, and you can only use the recipes they've pre-approved. If you can't sell your application on the Apps Store, you simply can't sell your application. You could try to market it to the owners of "jailbroken" phones, but those are getting fewer and farther between; Apple keeps making efforts, with every software update, to close those opportunities as well.

(One of the coders whose app was rejected by Apple "for duplication iTunes functionality" found a backdoor through a mechanism used to distribute beta versions; Apple quickly slammed that door shut, too.)

That's a lot to ask of a developer: "make your investment up front, and we'll let you know after you're done whether the last six months were a complete waste of your time." That's a very bad proposition. When you add the limitations of the SDK in terms of what you're not allowed to do, and then you add the truly draconian terms of the NDA associated with the SDK, it starts to look like something which won't really incent the development world to put in major effort.

What organization is going to commit to a 10,000-man-hour project for the iPhone when they'll have no idea whether they'll actually be able to sell the fruits of their labors? Dan is right in this: Apple is certainly entitled to run their business as they please, but I hope they're not counting too much on the notion that their position is unassailable (although, based on my experience working there, I'm pretty certain they are counting on exactly that notion). The same thing will happen to the iPhone as happened to the Macintosh in the mid-90s.

Early adopters are fickle people. As soon as there's something else they can adopt earlier that seems shinier than what they have now, they're off like a shot. That--and hubris--is what took Apple's market share from 22% down to 2% ten or fourteen years ago.

Apple's setting themselves up to see exactly the same thing happen again.