Apple has argued for a long time that they deny certain apps to provide the user with the best possible experience. Steve Jobs said in the WWDC 2010 Keynote that, "95% of apps are approved within 7 days." Google on the other hand has taken a much different approach to the app store, allowing any app to be listed. While this may provide the user with a sense of freedom and of having more options, does it provide a better user experience than Apple's approach?

Stability

Let's face it, users don't want to be messing with their mobile device trying to get it to work. Instead they "just want it to work!" (pun intended) While the Android Market does allow more developers to put more apps out to market, it also limits or eliminates any level of quality control on those apps. These apps can crash and cause frustration, lost data, and lost time. Apple tests each app submitted to make sure it: does what it says it's supposed to, doesn't crash, and doesn't use private API's. This means that although some problems still slip through the cracks, you have a much higher chance of an app running reliably on your iPhone than on your Droid.

Censorship

This is really what the whole fight about approving apps started over. In my opinion it all started because Apple (or rather Steve Jobs) decided to declare war on pornographic material, and banned anything suggestive from the app store. Apple has since denied other apps that maddened people for other reasons, but this is inconsequential. The question really is: Should any company have the right to decide how you use a device you paid for. I'll leave this question up to the FTC.

A Choice

What is really breaks down to, even though many loose sight of this, is that we have a much larger ecosystem of mobile devices around today than we once did. Apple did us a favor and invented iPhone, which changed the way we thought about smartphones. Google did us a favor and made Android, which changed the way we think about the app marketplace. Microsoft did us a favor and faded into the background, hopefully they'll do us another and just quit making phones.

At the end of the day you have a choice. A choice you didn't have before. If you want the freedom to run whatever you want on your device at the risk of instability, you can get Android. If you are willing to live within the "Walled Garden" of Apple and be guaranteed that your phone always works like expected, you have iPhone. There's not really much of a fight here if you think about it, just a healthy number of choices for different people with different needs.

Tags: Android, App Store, Apple, Apps, Droid, PDA, Store, iOS, iPhone, iPod, More…phone

0 members like this

Comment

You need to be a member of Geeks to add comments!

Join Geeks

Comment by Nathan Davies on June 12, 2010 at 9:32pm: Thanks Brad, thats a really good point.

Comment by Brad Waller on June 12, 2010 at 7:17pm: The easy solution would be to approve all apps that meet the stability requirements, but just choose which ones to list in the store. That way if you have an app that Apple does not think is good enough or appropriate for their customers, it is still made available for download, just not findable by the public.

It then becomes 100% the responsibility of the developer to publicize and link to the app and get people to download it.

Apple keeps their store nice and clean, and developers get apps in a location where customers can legally download them to phones without resorting to jailbreaking their phone and downloading apps from alternate app stores.

Comment by KR Toronto on June 12, 2010 at 11:18am: If Apple was smart, they would find some sort of middle ground on this. Perhaps an "Apple Approved" (or something like that) stamp on the 95% of Apps they currently approve - and a huge warning for the 5% that are NOT...

But that would mean that Steve Jobs would have to loosen his stranglehold on the Sheeple - hey, we can hope ;);)

RSS

Badges | Report an Issue | Terms of Service