By Daniel Tovrov: Subscribe to Daniel's RSS feed
October 12, 2011 10:40 AM EDT
Apple's iOS 5 will be released on Wednesday, and the new iPhone operating system, with its 200 new features, is already being hailed as one of the biggest and best innovations in mobile technology to date.
iOS 5, which Apple claims is "years ahead of anything else," comes just two days before the iPhone 4S is launched in the United States, Europe, Australia and Japan.
But, despite the amazing new developments, many Web designers and developers are troubled by Apple's policies, which some think stifle Internet innovation. While Apple's app development system has opened up the market considerably to new and up-and-coming programmers, their deserved dominance in the mobile marketplace has potentially set back innovation by years.
"On non-mobile devices, our lives are quickly shifting from native applications [i.e. coded for a specific computer or smartphone's operating system] to Web applications, but by Apple dominating the consumer smartphone market first, and executing it beautifully, they have started to set some really unhealthy precedents that the rest of the industry is copying while simply trying to keep pace," said Zeke Shore, the Co-Founder and Creative Director of design firm Type/Code.
In essence, Apple has become the middle man between developers trying to get their product to market and iPhone users. By forcing developers to work specifically with Apple's own coding language, Internet applications have fallen by the wayside.
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Developer and blogger Joe Hewitt, the man behind Firefox and the Facebook application for the iPhone, made a similar claim after the release of the iPhone 3GS. Hewitt said Apple needs to eliminate the App Store review process in order to foster more diverse application development.
"There is this thing called the World Wide Web which already works that way, and it has served millions and millions of people quite well for a long time now," Hewitt wrote on his blog.
He also says Apple does little to actually check apps for bugs, which is already the responsibility of the original developers, and the review process is more about legal compliance and terms of service violations.
"They don't trust us, and I resent that, because the vast majority of us are trustworthy," he added.
Since making those comments, Hewitt has quit all of his iPhone development projects and gone back to Web development.
Yet, thanks to its popularity, the iPhone is in little danger of being replaced by a better system. It also does give those willing to cooperate a chance to share, and get paid for, their hard work.
"The app store is definitely a powerful marketing vehicle, and having your app listed in the top 10, or top 100 even, means a ... ton of sales to a mass market," Shore commented.
Apple's App Store has given the developers who get approved access to 40 million users and the iPhone is a huge platform for anyone trying to make their name in the business. There are currently 500,000 apps for the iPhone, many of them selling for as little as 99 cents.
The minuscule price tag -- especially compared to games with sell for as much as $60 for consoles like the Xbox -- has made apps accessible to thousands upon thousands of people.
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