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Apple controls iPhone apps with an iron fist and capricious glee. Banning apps for whatever reason it comes up with, technical issues, content issues, competitive issues, whatever it wants to do it can and does. People are angry about it, people are up in arms about it, but nobody is leaving the platform (well, nobody who actually was developing apps for it, at least) as far as I can tell.

Busloads of money

Why is that? It’s because it is possible to make a crap load of money off the iPhone – people are buying these applications and there’s a rapidly increasing user base. It is stories like this one where the lone developer of Trism, a puzzle game, selling his work for $5 a pop has made $250,000 so far (that’s his share after Apple takes it’s cut). Two hundred fifty thousand dollars. If the app continues to sell at the rate it has been it’ll net him $1.5 million in it’s first year of existence. Obviously, not all apps are that successful, but there aren’t too many of ‘em right now and I’d guess more than a few fortunes have been made.

On the other hand, Apple’s two most recent bans were for competitive reasons. Podcaster was banned because it was in competition with the iPod software on the phone and most recently MailWrangler – a wrapper around Gmail which Apple decided was too much competition for their Mail app to deal with. These have taken the banning to a whole different level. MailWrangler isn’t even an mail application – it’s more of a slightly enhanced wrapper around the iPhone version of Gmail that you can get to in Safari.

Control v. Freedom

Here’s the thing, there’s two competing forces – Apple’s desire to have complete control over the iPhone universe and developer distaste for that control. Seeing as how due to that big potential payday developers can’t leave the platform their creative anger is being directed elsewhere. To paraphrase Leia, “the more you tighten your grip, Steve, the more applications will slip through your fingers…”

The earliest and still going strong way to join the rebels is jail breaking your iPhone. A constant battle since well before there was an App Store this means opens up an entirely different realm of applications, completely unfettered by even the laws of the SDK. The difficulty with this is that with every update one runs the risk of bricking one’s phone – although, it hasn’t happened (permanently), yet.

Subverting the System

More recently, though, with this rash of bannings, people have taken to subverting Apple’s own mechanisms to their own purposes. People are using the Ad Hoc distribution method, which caps out at only 100 users per app, to distribute their apps by creating multiple instances of the app, each hosting up to 100 folks, effectively allowing them to do whatever they want. This was pioneered, as far as I know, by the Podcaster developer.

There are some issues with this in terms of user convenience – it requires a bit more effort on the part of the user to get into this Ad Hoc distribution system. Not a bunch more, but compared to the ease of the App Store, it’s a reasonable barrier. Nevertheless, thus far it seems that Podcaster has sold over a thousand copies of the app for $10 a piece – and that all goes to the developer, since it is outside of the App Store Apple does not get it’s 30%.

Seemingly taking that to the next level, the site Apptism.com provides a web interface to the App Store with all the usual trimmings, ratings, comments, etc… (while I haven’t spent a ton of time on that site, it seems like a welcome means to browse applications over the crufty, crappy iPhone App Store interface). More interestingly, though, it promises to provide an easy route for developers to use this Ad Hoc distribution technique to sell their apps in the store.

If enough developers get fed up with Apple’s control and switch to this model (or something yet to be created but similar) that would be a major issue for the company. Here would be a convenient way to browse and purchase apps outside Apple’s control and it would be just as convenient for the developer. Unlike with jail broken apps, since this played along with Apple’s technical rules, new updates would be very unlikely to break these applications (well as unlikely as any other appstore app).

The Reaction

Apple has three options, the first would be to simply ignore these developers – as they have been so far. This parallel app store model would exist but, to Apple’s mind, would remain small since you’d have to be fairly savvy to seek it out. I think this is likely only to a very low threshold.

The second option would be to lessen the restrictions on apps, ideally to only technical quality control. This would, I believe, be a long term win for both Apple and consumers allowing for a variety of applications to compete with each other for marketshare – increasing competition and application quality which would ultimately increase the value of the platform as a whole.

The last option would be for Apple to use its rumored kill switch to disable these rogue apps. If not that then taking some other action like changing the way ad hoc distribution worked to prevent it from being used like that. This would most likely be more problematic for Apple, since it would be terrible PR and most likely would have little long term effect as just another escalation in the battle between Apple and it’s developer renegades. They’d simply come up with another workaround for distributing their apps.

I’m really not sure, though, which route Apple will go down when this problem gets to a point where it can’t be ignored. I’d like to think that they’d take option 2 – or some shade of that with much more transparency in the sytem, but the way they’ve been handling things thus far leads me to believe that the kill switch is a more likely scenario at this point. What do you think about all this?