It’s brilliant marketing is all. Apple is creating and protecting an eco-system. They are in the loop for all content creation and content is being created always on their terms. Free apps that meet their standard are free advertising material. For-pay apps are consumer content to which they take a 30% cut. Brilliant indeed.

If you allow procedural content then suddenly people can bypass the distribution model and of course they do not what that. Yes that means keeping people computer-illiterate consumers, and those who are literate are forced to comply or go elsewhere.

If the iPhone ecosystem stays a small sub-aspect of the smart phone/mobile market it’s fine. If they get near monopoly position, then suddenly this will be fodder for lots of litigation/anti-trust issues and all that.

For now it just bites the behinds of academic research and competitors who have no recourse, like Adobe.

Unfortunately Google isn’t that much better. They monetize knowing a whole lot of things about you. It’s less obvious and can blow up big time.

Symbian is dead (a dying giant), RIM is too niche and noone is really running a commercial strand of Linux that looks broadly promising. Microsoft missed the train and it’s not clear if they can make up the lost ground.

Yeah Apple is doing it all right. It’s just the question if this amount of behavior control makes sense or should even be permissible. I’m confused why Adobe hasn’t tried to sue with the argument that the script prohibitions are actually torts to hurt their contracts with their customers. But I’m sure they had that one run by their lawyers.

But yeah their hardware is very nice. And their software environment is very neat if you can live with the restrictions.

This is why I will always need a real laptop. I think I might stop breathing if I don’t have access to a compiler or an interpreter, of some sort.

This is why in the great Corporate War – I find it easy to cast Apple as the Axis, and Google as the Allies.

Hey, no one said the Allies’ model of free-market capitalism was perfect, but it certainly allowed for greater freedoms and opportunities than the counterpart.

At the same time – I’m certainly not saying that Google doesn’t have a slightly frightening hegemony over information distribution, but I’d rather see a cyber-world governed by the principles of Google than Apple.

Thankfully, we’ll never be in an either/or scenario. I hope.

Wow. You mean that Apple won’t allow people to download a free app that would allow them to then obtain further free apps which result in no revenue for Apple. And instead they’re forcing people to have to pay for all apps thereby creating a revenue stream for Apple? On a locked platform where they drop system updates over the air that may well violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by removing functionality from your system (i.e. jailbreaking)? Unsurprised cat is unsurprised.

Man. What’s the point of apps if they don’t produce any content, anyways?

Here’s the link to Processing.js by the way. I’ve run a few things on my iPhone using it via Safari.

http://processingjs.org/

Can’t say I’m surprised.