Don't drive iPhone developers away, Apple

One of the presenters at the recent C4 Mac developers conference made a point about Apple that is incredibly relevant to how the company is viewed, especially by the media and rabid Apple fans. To paraphrase his statement, in dealing with Apple, one should never assume that the company is being malicious when its behavior can be just as easily explained by incompetence.

These days, there are a lot of iPhone developers--and users--who are suddenly rooting for incompetence. Because when it comes to the entire machinery of the App Store, something is terribly wrong. It's not something you may even notice today if you're an average iPhone user. But in the end, if things don't change, what's happening right now may seriously weaken the iPhone as a platform and enable Apple's competitors to get the upper hand when it comes to dominating the smartphone market.

To say that those responsible for the administration of the App Store are actually incompetent is pure hyperbole. Setting up the App Store has been a gargantuan task. I know people enjoy assuming that complicated tasks are actually quite simple, but let's be real here. In a very short period of time, Apple had to roll out a complete third-party development environment for programmers (while still trying to get all the screws tightened on the iPhone 2.0 software--and look how well that turned out). It had to set up a new infrastructure for selling software via iTunes and get all the legal documents and payment methods worked out. And for some very good reasons, Apple created an application-approval process.

That's a lot of stuff in a very short period of time. This year has been a tough one for Apple, and in many different venues we've seen the company struggle with its success and its rapid growth. Apple can only do so much, and with the App Store and iPhone development, it may have bit off more than it could chew. But what was it to do? Macworld was certainly at the head of the line of pundits and developers who were banging their drums, demanding that Apple open the iPhone up to third-party development as soon as possible. Apple certainly felt that pressure--as well as the opportunity to really transform the iPhone and iPod touch through a third-party development system.

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