Ever since Apple introduced the App Store, someone or other has written weekly (perhaps daily) about why Apple’s tight control over the App Store is a bad idea. Every time an app is rejected or delayed, the teapot is stirred again.
This isn’t going to be one of those stories where I accuse Apple of being overly controlling and inconsistent with its App Store rejection policies. Nor am I going to demand, as many have, that Apple needs to stop filtering the App Store out of some free-floating sense of fairness and righteousness.
No, I’m here to say to Apple that while I understand very well the reasons for the company’s walled-garden approach to native iPhone OS apps, the strengths of that approach have now been surpassed by the bad publicity and reputation that Apple and its products are now getting in the market as a whole.
Many critics of Apple’s policies have suggested that developers will abandon the iPhone OS for more open platforms such as Android. Some of them have, and I’m sure more will follow. But I’m not convinced that the absence of some developers on the platform will really make the difference. As long as there are tens of millions of iPhone OS devices out there—and Apple keeps selling them at a fast pace—there will be developers who want to sell apps to run on them.
It’s those device sales that worry me. Not in the short term, but over time.
These days, when I talk to people who are not immersed in the minutiae of the technology industry, I notice a troubling trend: They tend to speak about Apple’s products with some affection, but it’s increasingly tempered with assumptions that the devices are largely incompatible with competing technologies.
In other words, Apple’s getting a reputation. Fair or not, once consumers begin to perceive the company as being overly controlling and devoted to lock-in—and don’t think that Apple’s competitors aren’t hammering the company on this point—it will start to be a drag on Apple’s hardware sales.
The other day I was talking to a colleague, a bright guy who obviously works in the technology and media industries, but isn’t on the technical side. He’s what I’d call a moderately informed tech consumer, and I was showing him my new iPad. His response to me was shocking: He said that he had been interested in buying an iPad, but needed to read PDF files, and since Apple only supported its own formats, he couldn’t buy one.
Of course the iPad reads PDFs, I told him. He was surprised. Can I load my own videos and music on it, or only stuff I buy from Apple? Sure, I told him, you can load your videos and music. I managed to bat down every single concern he had about the device. He didn’t mention Flash once, because running Flash in a browser wasn’t a priority for him, but Apple’s anti-Flash stance had helped reinforce his perception that the iPad was a closed-off device that only played back stuff purchased from Apple.
This kind of consumer perception is what can hurt Apple, if it spreads. And don’t think that every Android phone maker isn’t spreading it, and don’t think that every tablet maker won’t spread it as soon as they finally ship those tablets.
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