For those who don’t already know, Steven Frank (a.k.a. stevenf on many sites) is a developer at Panic, Inc., a multiple-award-winning Mac software shop here in Portland. He (and his firm) are unapologetic Mac boosters, and have based their entire business around producing applications which appeal in large part to the aesthetic and functional preferences of the most die-hard Apple fans.
I’m unlikely to work as a proprietary desktop software developer any time soon, given that I haven’t tried to write a desktop GUI application in about five years, but I do appreciate the work that Panic puts into polishing their user experience, and have a great deal of respect for them as a development team. And so, it was extremely refreshing to me to see many of the fears and frustrations I’ve expressed about the iPhone/App Store platform lock-in as an outside being echoed by someone who is working within that ecosystem.
One realization I had early on in my IT career was that almost any two firms could easily become competitors. Given the rate at which a competent team can develop most any class of application on the planet, and the generality of the platforms on which our code runs, it is entirely conceivable that your platform vendor of choice today (or your client buying your tools or OS) could become a direct competitor tomorrow. For that very reason, trusting the future of your business to the continuing benevolence of a vendor is a very risky decision.
Every developer working on applications for the iPhone/iTouch platform is in exactly that precarious position right now. Those innovative applications that drive sales of the platform could easily be incorporated into the next release of the OS, since Apple has more than enough resources to re-implement any 3rd-party app without breaking a sweat. (There is certainly precedent for this: just ask the developers of Watson what it’s like to one-up Apple in the system utility space.) Even worse, truly disruptive applications that offer capabilities beyond Apple’s comfort zone (or that of one or more of their mobile network providers) could find themselves summarily dropped from the App Store, effectively strangling any business the developer hoped to build around the product.
This is, to me at least, an unacceptable bargain, and I’m surprised that so many other developers seem to have no problem with the arrangement. (Have I mentioned how much I can’t wait for Android?)