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Apple shouldn't open the gates to the App Store, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't open the gates to the iPhone.

If you want to be listed in the App Store and have Apple handle your payment processing and even a bit of marketing for you, you're going to have to go through their approval process. Every single store in the world decides which products it will and won't sell. The App Store isn't, and shouldn't be, any different.

However, on the Mac platform you can develop an app and sell it on your own web site or put it on a CD in a box and sell it at Best Buy or any other store. You can't do that on the iPhone.

I guess opening up the iPhone platform wouldn't really help DHH, since I'm sure he wants his app listed and sold in the App Store, but I can see why developers expect more parity between the two platforms (Mac and iPhone).

However, I can also see how it's easier for Apple to provide a better (and more consistent) customer experience when the App Store is the only way to buy and install apps. And since Apple cares more about customers, and customers don't really care about the openness of their phone's OS... that's probably not going to change any time soon.

On the Mac platform you can develop an app and sell it on your own web site

Yes. And you can also develop malware and give it away on your own website. And then, when customers complain to Apple, they can do... what, exactly?

In other words, DHH is wrong when he suggests that the App Store isn't about security. Sure, the App Store is not about prescreening for security holes -- obviously they can't find every hole or every trojan in their pitiful half-hour code review. But if every app goes through the store, and every store app can be revoked, and every store app comes attached to a known submitter with a valid identity and credit card...

You can get a trojan through the system. But you very likely can't do it more than once, it won't survive long in the wild after it's detected, and the FBI has a paper trail to your house.

> Yes. And you can also develop malware and give it away on your own website.

Yeah, and doing sex with random strangers is as dangerous ... you never know what you're going to get.

That's why I'm a proponent of Sex licenses, given by state institutions after testing your general health, your mental health and the quality of your DNA ... people without a license shouldn't be allowed to have sex, to work in public institutions (since that's where people fuck around the most), or to leave town without notifying the proper authorities.

Yeah, sure. While we're doing this so-called "quality control", let's create App Stores for Linux and Windows as well, and make it impossible for people to install anything which doesn't go through a review process by clerks who probably have no idea about software development. That would awesome, right? No more malware!

Sheesh.

so how many viruses have you downloaded to your Mac in last year?

The obvious problem of allowing arbitrary programs on the iPhone is that it opens the door to piracy. That's the main reason why Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo spend a huge amount of resources trying to prevent hackers from opening up their game consoles.

Considering that Apple is going hard for the games market, they need to enforce strict control to get games publishers on side.

That's a hard pill to swallow for me. Apple didn't seem that interested in the iPhone becoming a gaming platform until the success of games in the AppStore forced them to pay attention to the market for them.

At the very least, this was not their original plan for the AppStore and the 'iron fist' that they wield today.

The App Store should purely be a signalling message about the quality of apps. A "seal of approval" by Apple. If somebody doesn't care, then they should be able to install anything they want without falling afoul of federal law.

Okay, I hate snarky replies like the one I'm about to make, but regardless, here goes...

I'm a web developer, and if we were to open up the Internet, let me tell you what will happen:

First of all, there will be hardcore porn immediately. Boob websites will flood the Internet, because that's what makes money. If the Internet implements a flagging mechanism, then you will be one click away from opening a website to purchase hard core porn.

Lots of people will create websites with 5 pictures and call it "Celebrity News". For example Britney Spears News, etc. Websites will have new content every single day so they are always at the top of Google search results. People will create websites that do nothing but just have a title people will search for.

With the amount of money people are spending online, and the fact that people are looking for cheap entertainment rather than useful tools, the Internet would be a heaven for spammers and scammers.

If we ever unlocked the gates, it would be the absolute end of the Internet.

I have a phone number of a website reviewer and I talk to him every now and then. They get a lot of crap. The gate is not to QC a website, it's to prevent the Internet from being a crapware and spammers paradise.

Oh, you are so close to enlightenment you can practically taste it!

Or maybe you are enlightened and this is your attempt at a Zen koan. If so: pretty good.

The iPhone already has a built-in free-for-all free-of-charge Transmetropolitan Interzone, where you can develop and publish whatever you want, pron and scammers run free, and nothing is controlled by anyone, for better or for worse. It's called "Mobile Safari". The rest of the iPhone experience -- the App Store -- is different from that. That may turn out to be a major reason why the App Store is worth so much money.

Yes, the restrictions are definitely the reason the App Store is worth so much money. Asking Apple to remove them is akin to demanding that movie theater owners allow outside food and beverages and forgo their $8 popcorn.

My point is that there is a kind of fearmongering in comments like the one above mind -- that if somehow Apple were to open up its platform to the wild and wooly world, it'd soon be overrun by every form of scam and debauchery known to man.

Countless examples prove otherwise. There is no "reason" for Apple to maintain these restrictions other than money.

(Oh, and it looks like enlightenment will have to wait after the blow to my karma I just took on that comment above.)

My point is that there is a kind of fearmongering in comments like the one above mind -- that if somehow Apple were to open up its platform to the wild and wooly world, it'd soon be overrun by every form of scam and debauchery known to man.

It's not that you've shown that there wouldn't be "every form of scam and debauchery known to man." It's more that you've shown that there would be, but the world won't end and it wouldn't be so bad for you. But for a lot of people out there, the experience on the net is full of suckiness, because they don't have all the knowledge that you do. If someone wants to create a walled garden for those folks, why can't they? Wouldn't that be allowed in a free market? It's not like they're forcing you to buy their phone!

> But for a lot of people out there, the experience on the net is full of suckiness, because they don't have all the knowledge that you do.

That's not my experience with regular-users, and I've been around such people a lot.

The experience when dealing with a computer in general is full of "suckiness" ... I saw people that can't use GMail because the left-menu which contains "inbox" and "sent" plus the top search-bar is somehow counterintuitive to them. So the IPhone/IPad experience can't change that with flashy buttons / pinch to zoom, although it is somewhat an improvement to regular interfaces (for phones at least, I have yet to see a study which argues that the iPhone interface is more intuitive or productive that your average Windows PC).

But other than that, the Internet experience is as good as possible ... when searching on Google for a definition, more often than not the first result is from Wikipedia (which contains articles edited by many regular non-tech users).

When wanting to contact old friends, I see many people not having trouble with Facebook. Surely some may be mislead by "the Facebook of Sex" by ending up in the wrong place, but I never see people stupid enough to not figure out something's different and that's not Facebook.

When wanting to read online newspapers, I never see people wondering were to find the desired newspaper, or how to click on a story-link. Surely, there are lots of wannabes out there, that's why as an online newspaper you still need marketing to grow your brand.

Email / IM are also 2 services that are used a lot. I don't see people having trouble using Yahoo's IM (and in my country, everybody with an Internet connection and his dog has a YIM account). Email is kind of tricky in a way ... to send emails to multiple people, they never use the BCC field, and that's a PITA sometimes, but it's not like their end-goal isn't reached.

So, when making such assertions, please provide references to studies ;)

In just going by how it is for my parents, BCC Field? You're not even in the ballpark!

The Apple marketing is that the iPhone is for everyone, not just people who want someone else to vet what they do with the iPhone.

And there's nothing stopping Apple from making a device that truly is for everyone, with one mode that can be locked down completely so you can have someone else limit what you can do to do keep you safe, and another mode for people who don't need to be handheld and are adults and can make their own decisions without needing to effectively violate the DMCA or loose hardware support from Apple to do it. However, Apple is welcome to create whatever device they want if they think they can sell it.

Yeah, yeah. The issue is, Apple owns the app store. They are in the business of making money, and they generally do this by being tasteful. By all accounts they seem to be doing pretty well.

Ok to everything but the "tasteful" part. Where exactly do all the fart apps and the jiggle girl apps fit into the "tasteful" aesthetic of Steve Jobs?

My point being that the App Store's actual decisions seem far more random than you would expect if you assumed pure greed or pure Type A control freak issues or pure Bauhaus aesthetics were running the show.

I'm also an app developer, and I agree with your assessment.

But... how the hell can Google not get GV in the store? Or Google Navigation?

There's spam in the app store now. But we're missing out on multiple, high-quality, well-backed apps because Apple's busy playing hardball with app review.

There are effective community spam countermeasures (see XNA) that work, and work well. I wouldn't be opposed to charging a per-app submission fee to keep spam out.

Of course simply replacing app review with nothing would be a disaster. But nobody's seriously suggesting that. The computer industry has decades of experience dealing with spam. The only really dumb idea is to hire full-time employees to find it by hand.

The best compromise would be to trust a given application after its first (or first few) review(s) and allow its developer to update it without going through the review process afterward. This would keep the gate for spammy applications and establish a relation of trust between the devs and Apple.

Of course, this is unlikely to happen as Apple is using the review process to make sure the apps are not calling private APIs or violating whatever rules Apple decides to apply. But giving up this last layer of "security" for Apple to allow for better developer AND user experience would be the best move Apple could do to improve the whole App Store frustations from developers.

Well, the problem of filtering private API usage would be easy to fix. They're already using an automated tool to detect it, so why not just scan the app right when the user uploads it? That would actually be better than the current system. Right now, if you upload an app that uses private APIs, you have to wait for however long it takes to actually get to a human reviewer (2-14 days) and then they run the tool, wasting a lot of time.

I do not believe they should just blindly get rid of the review process of app updates, but I do think that there should be some priority given to them. I believe that a developer should be able to push updates out to their apps with relative quickness compared to getting a new app approved. This would even benefit Apple for the applications that are teetering on making a decent amount of sales but are lagging in the sales due to some kind of problem/stability issue.

I don't see how you can be anything but completely wrong on this. Why have none of your predictions come true for the Android Market?

(Yes, it's quite a bit smaller than Apple's App Store, but it's still plenty big enough that if you were on track, we'd see evidence there.)

Google doesn't allow porno apps in the Market:

"Nudity and Sexually Explicit Material We don't allow content that contains nudity, graphic sex acts, or sexually explicit material. We also don't allow content that drives traffic to commercial pornography sites."

Gratuitous updates are a problem on Android. I find it hard to believe that apps like Wifi Analyzer or Mabilo Ringtones are really being updated 2-3 times a week. Maybe but it seems strange to me. They could just be honestly submitting daily builds or something. Supposedly 1.6 has made improvements to the Market that might nullify the problem (I'm stuck on 1.5 so I wouldn't know firsthand)

For security concerns we did see the fake Bank of America app make it into the Android Market briefly. It's not a widespread problem but it's happened so we can't ignore it.

Google doesn't allow porno apps in the Market

Yes, that's the point. DHH isn't recommending removing all rules; he's recommending eliminating the approval process to get apps/updates into the Store. Apple would still, of course, have the ability to remove apps that violated the TOS.

The Android Market is run in just this manner, and it isn't overrun with pornography. So having rules and enforcing them but not having to pre-approve every release seems to work.

Gratuitous updates are a problem on Android.

While there do appear to be some developers pushing fake updates, I'm not sure that exactly constitutes a problem. If it ever gets out of hand, there are a lot of ways this could be managed that don't involve pre-approval.

The apps I usually see frequent updates are apps where there's a lot of bugfixing or innovation going on, nothing wrong with frequent updates there.

I also think fake updates will tend to backfire on abusers, because users are presented with two options: upgrade, or uninstall.

They haven't come totally true because there isn't enough developer interest in the Android platform yet. I know from reading thread after thread on this site that the majority of folks here will find offense with that but I'm sorry that it's the truth.

The Android's market share is garbage in comparison to the iPhone. The Android phones are surely fine pieces of hardware but they just don't have the saturation yet to be used in examples like this. I obviously can't prove this but I would be willing to bet that if the Android Marketplace had as many apps as the App Store it would be full of trash blocking out the good stuff. There's plenty of low quality stuff on the App Store even with the review process but high quality applications still float to the top.

Further down someone makes the twist on his predictions by comparing it to the Internet. Sorry folks, but the Internet is full of junk. More of you should be aware of this now that the front page has had several "make money fast" posts recently. It's not all rainbows and butterflies out there; people will do anything to make a dollar and they don't particular care about changing the world with their new Ruby on Rails driven to-do list web application.

This get a lot of crap regardless: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2146-theres-quality-control-f...

With 140,000+ apps, the bulk are bound to be shit.

Deal with spammers and hardcore porn like every other site on the web deals with it. "Is this inappropriate?" flags. It's worked fine for places like Flickr to keep out the pornsters, it can work fine here.

This is a sham argument for control.

"The gate is not to QC an app, it's to prevent the app store from being a crapware and spammers paradise."

Is this what your reviewer friend told you? Because part of the problem is that Apple hasn't said much if anything about just what the review process is for, so everyone is left to speculate while having to decipher arbitrary and vague rejection reasons.

Interesting.

I have a G1, and anyone can release apps to the app market. While there's crap available, it is nowhere anything like your scenario.

Maybe I just don't spend enough time checking out new apps.

If Apple did away with the review process, there's no reason they'd have to keep funneling all apps through the store. They could allow/force the cesspool apps to be distributed through the Web.

If that's what the market wants, that's what the market wants.

Are you saying that these apps will suddenly (by virtue of being approved) be listed on the top apps lists, and become popular? If so, what's wrong with that, let the people decide what the people want, no?

There's spammers and scammers on the web, and people fall for them all the time, is that a good argument to police the web, then?

It's not what the market wants. It's what the suppliers want. Let me give an analogy:

There is a country with no pineapples. Someone grows a pineapple farm, and sells pineapples. There are no other pineapples, so he charges a lot for them. He becomes rich. Other farmers hear of this and start growing pineapples - they become rich at the start, but as pineapples become more available, soon the price of pineapples is the same as everywhere else. But people have a lot of invested resources in pineapples, so they start selling at discounts. There are more pineapples than consumers, so people start getting aggressive with their sales. The guys who made the money leave the unprofitable market to go sell maize, but the late entries who have just invested in pineapples, and the people who were dirt poor, are still battling on, trying to sell their pineapples. They start harvesting unripe pineapples and heating them to make them seem ripe quicker.

People get disillusioned with all the shit pineapples they are getting and decide to rather buy some other fruit without all the competition. When they do buy pineapples, they stick to very old and trusted names - new pineapple sellers are automatically assumed to be doing something corny.

-- What I'm saying is - the suppliers will destroy the market.

Do you have any references to real-life instances of this happening?

It's interesting, but speculation. And it reminds me of the so-called Tragedy of the Commons, a oft-cited parable that doesn't play out quite like that in real life.

http://onthecommons.org/content.php?id=2542

You're saying that because there will be a ton of porn/scammy apps on the app store, people are going to stop wanting apps?

I'm not sure what you're implying, so could you tell me what you think, realistically, will happen if the approval process lets everyone in, that cannot be solved by smart filters

(ie. top apps lists, child-safe apps, as voted upon by people using the store)

> There are more pineapples than consumers, so people start getting aggressive with their sales.

> They start harvesting unripe pineapples and heating them to make them seem ripe quicker.

If there is already an oversupply of pineapples, I think suppliers would would want to stretch the ripening times and optimize for quality instead.

> People get disillusioned with all the shit pineapples they are getting and decide to rather buy some other fruit without all the competition

With an oversupply, the consumer actually gets a very good value. The price is right, and there are plenty to choose from. Consumers like competition.

I'm not sure what this example demonstrates. Of course every individual supplier wants less competition. But don't forget that the suppliers in this case are developers, and it's the developers that are complaining about the status quo.

It seems a pretty rational argument to me.

I have no idea why you're being downvoted.

Because it's a zeroth-order, zero-thought mantra of an argument? A childish one-dimensional approach to a multidimensional question?

Among other things: There is no "market". There are markets. There is a market for hardcore pron. There is a market for child-safe web surfing. There is a market for violent games. There is a market for nonviolent games. There is a market for a device you can be seen using in a corporate boardroom. There is a market for a device you can give to your mom. There is a market for a device that makes Steve Jobs proud.

Many of these markets are mutually exclusive. Some of these markets are bigger than others. Some of them have higher prestige. Some of them have much higher margins.

So that's easily solvable using a filter of some sort.

What's stopping apple from adding a filter that says: "Child-safe" but allowing every app in to the app store, so that you can turn the filter off and browse whatever it is that you want.

By market I really meant, people, as opposed to referring to a free market of some sort. I think a free market would be great if there was some mechanism to allow the good stuff to bubble up to the top.

What's stopping apple from adding a filter that says: "Child-safe"...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store#Application_ratings

What's stopping Apple is the cost-benefit analysis -- implementing and policing a filtering system to replace the current approval process (especially policing it) costs Apple more in time, money and complexity than it benefits them.

The App Store, like the iTunes store, exists solely to move Apple's hardware. The calculus isn't "will opening up the App Store please the handful of developers who refuse to operate under its current restrictions", it's "will opening up the App Store significantly increase sales of iPods/iPhones/iPads." I have yet to see a convincing argument as to how opening up the App Store would do that.

Really? How is the android market any different? This has not happened there.

Have you ever looked at the Android market? Aside from the porn, it has all of those problems.