The real reason behind Apple’s restrictive AppStore policy (November 17, 2009)

Have just came back from 5th Fraunhofer FOKUS IMS Workshop in Berlin. The conference program was great this year (I’ll post the detailed overview of the event later), and I had a chance to have a lot of conversations with colleagues from telecom industriy and standardizing organizations, both peers and higher-level decision makers.

One of the interesting discussions sparkled after a presentation on BONDI, a device API which allow mobile applications of the future access device capabilities in a standardized way. The question being discussed was “Why do we need a way to restrict the application’s access in any way, be this AppStore review process or standardized API policies?“ Indeed, web and desktop applications ecosystem is able to survive and flourish without any external intervention and in majority of cases it’s the end user who (successfully) chooses good applications over malicious ones.

The very interesting answer being born in the lobby discussions included two major players in the AppStore game: telcos, who play directly, and government, who plays indirectly. Telecom industry is huge when compared to the internet industry. Just look at Google’s 2008 net income of $4,2 Bn, compare it with AT&T’s $10,5 Bn (data is from Wikipedia) and remember that Google is one of a kind, whereas companies comparable with AT&T exist on every continent. Telecom industry is also highly regulated, so the biggest fear for the telcos is the government intervention. I can easily imagine the situation where government closes GPS for public use after some criminal has stolen the victim’s GPS location and was able to commit a crime. For telcos this means complete loss of the revenue from location-based services, and to avoid that they in advance force the control over assets that may potentially compromise the end user’s security, hence the whole AppStore approval process story.

Note that none of similar regulations exist in internet, because there’s no easy way to enforce the control over it. This also explains why Android Market is review-free and Palm App Catalog is not (I consider those two as AppStore’s competitors): Google, unlike Palm, does not manufacture any phones subsidized by telcos, and will not suffer should government intervention happen.

Up to now market shows that AppStore protected by approval process could still be a success. Looking at the situation under this angle I may only guess whether developers will ever have a non-restricted access to AppStore.