There are a lot of people completely cheesed off at Apple right now. Rejecting iPhone applications for seemingly undefinable reasons has been going on for a while, but the latest row is over the fact that some of those rejections have been accompanied by an NDA warning:
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Developers and bloggers are up in arms, as they should be, over a system that is clearly designed to disenfranchise the folks who are the App Store’s heart; pumping the icky-green cash-colored blood through the veins of the feverish iPhone apps market.
But guess what? Some guy made a game the netted $250k dollars in a little over 2 months. Holy smokes! Another guy made a virtual coy pond, and I would guess that he has made around $100k. These are low-utility apps. They aren’t solving a real problem for every person that purchases them. This is impulse shopping at its best (you don’t even have to take out your wallet).
This isn’t an established market with lots of rational actors. Its the gold rush all over again, for buyers AND sellers. The rules as to what was acceptable were “bent” back then (read: broken; smashed to pieces), and they will bend now. Until more people are betting their livelihoods on the app store, most people in there now are hobbyists, the majority of developers will grumble a bunch and go right ahead and submit another entry into the free money giveaway that is being sponsored by Apple. If a few people get hurt in the process, well, prospecting is dangerous work.
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