Removing Podcaster: Malice vs Stupidity

"All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best."
 ~ Occam's Razor

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
 ~ Heinlein's Razor

If you haven't heard, Apple has decided to remove Podcaster from the App Store. This application now has the dubious honor of joining NetShare, I Am Rich and Pull My Finger in the "I just wasted several months of my life" club for developers without a distributor. They even have an official uniform with this on the front: "I wrote an application for the App Store, had it rejected and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt."

After reading up on all that had happened with these various moves by Apple, you probably came to one of two conclusions. Either they were doing this out of malice because they don't want to allow competition with their products, or they are doing this out of stupidity because they actually believe this is the best way to go about running a business.

Either way you look at it, this really sucks for developers. In fact, I can't understand how anyone at Apple could spin this in a positive light. Very shortly Apple is going to experience a revolt of its top iPhone developers as they move away from writing applications that would be sold on the App Store. This is absolutely catastrophic for Apple because this policy won't effect the mediocre, knock off, derivative applications written by your average developers.

This policy is a slap in the face to the best iPhone developers who will see this move as a direct threat to the type of applications they might write. After all, it isn't the middle of the pack developers who will create products that can compete with Apple, it is only the best programmers who can challenge them. Losing 10% of your developers isn't a huge problem. Losing the top 10% of your developers is completely untenable.

Maybe somebody at Apple will wake up and fix this, I really hope so. Because if they don't, I think one of two things is going to happen. Either developers are going to continue to create great apps, but they are going to sell them on their own sites with instructions on how to load them onto the iPhone in defiance of Apple. Or, more likely, these great applications just aren't going to get written at all. These developers will just move onto other projects that don't involve the iPhone. I can't see a mass exodus to Microsoft' mobile platform (or even Andriod for that matter) but I do think that a good number of people will just look at things and decide that the hassle isn't worth it.

It is these people who will divert their energy to other things and this will be a great loss both to Apple and to iPhone users. Because if this trend continues long enough, the App Store will be completely populated with simple, boring, non-threatening applications. And the distinction will become even more pronounced if Google's Android marketplace is truly free of restrictions. If this state of affairs continues long enough, even the densest, most ardent iPhone user is going to start asking why the App store has so many poor offerings.