11th
2010
In defense of the App Store (Why Apple has sold millions of iPhones, and will sell millions of iPads, and will continue to do so)
While the entire tech community is ranting and raving about the limitations imposed on developers for the iPhone, Apple is busy providing the first actual usable computing platform for everybody else. Think of the iPhone (and the iPad, by extension) as an omelet made by Apple. There are a lot of things that can go into the omelet to make it delicious, but you don’t get to put, say, rainbow sprinkles in the omelet. Even if you really like rainbow sprinkles.
Where they fail to coincide with the Apple vision of the experience (which seems to be hovering at around 100% overlap with the average user’s good experience), some developer choices have to go by the wayside, because the fact is that not all opinions are equally valid. Maybe Apple is using the restrictions it has in ways that are unfair, but by and large all I’ve seen is this - rule #1 is ‘you don’t get to break the experience’.
While there may be some legitimate complaints, I have little sympathy for someone who wants to ship an iPhone app without conforming to the GUI guidelines. Get the picture - it’s _your_ broken UI that the iPhone is a response to, and users are buying it in droves because almost all of the time it works without even _thinking_ about putting up a fuss. (And ‘works’ has a deep implicit component of being consistent with the rest of the phone’s UI, or at least of utilizing innovative and functional design.) I have a little more tolerance for other applications that have been blocked for various reasons, but I don’t fundamentally think that the App Store approach is wrong. The ends justify the means… but only if the ends actually justify the means. The App Store has provided what no other mobile platform has to date - near-complete user satisfaction. It is far from obvious to me that the iPhone would be as good as it is without those restrictions in place.
I had a Palm for 10 years, and a Blackberry for 18 months, and I build my own gentoo boxes from scratch, and I’m probably still fully capable of troubleshooting an ornery scsi chain, and so on. The iPhone has made me realize that even though I have the technical skill to deal with complicated configurations and obscure UI, I am often much happier with something that just works. Apple’s control over the entire process is integral to that. It may be the case that free developer reign is compatible with this kind of exceptional user experience, but not one other platform has yet shown that to be possible. I’m not _entirely_ convinced, but I think the above is how I feel.
In theory, I support the freedom of developers to build what they want and get it into the hands of customers however they want. I have a lot of trouble reconciling that with the fact that I really don’t want sprinkles in my omelet.
[ Update on the food metaphor: No one would suggest that Thomas Keller should serve Domino’s pizza in his restaurants, and no one would object if he had a program for visiting chefs to serve food to his customers at Per Se or the French Laundry but required that he personally approved all of the dishes they were going to serve. Is this really any different? ]
