What I would like to see is a widespread developer boycott of the iPhone platform. This would bring Apple back to the days where they used to cajole developers into writing software for the Mac.
As long as there is money to be made there will always be developers so a boycott is pointless. If every developer currently in the app store decided to abandon it tomorrow it would only serve to create an irresistible target for developers who had been turned off by the heavy competition.
Until we live in a world where every developer has all the money they could ever want there will always be developers for a platform with over 30 million potential customers.
The analogy with the Mac doesn't really work, because the Mac has never been anything but a computing platform. But the iPhone is a phone first and a platform second. Remember that the iPhone was a huge success when it was introduced in 2007, despite a higher price point and no third-party apps at all.
As long as the iPhone is subsidized by phone carriers, Apple's cash cow will be hardware sales. It won't be until the smartphone market reaches a certain level of saturation that Apple will have an incentive to focus on the App Store as a revenue generator. And when that happens, I bet they will be a lot less mercurial with their developers.
This sort of glosses over the underlying problem here:
Apple is treating the developers like crap now. Whether we classify this as outright abuse or just as sever neglect is up for debate, but it's hard to argue that Apple is doing a good job of treating the devs well.
So the developers are supposed to patiently sit by and just 'take' the abuse/neglect waiting for Apple to 'come around' or 'see the light?' I'm sorry, but you can't run a small business based on faith that another business will stop treating your contributions as crap and start treating you with more respect. And even when that business (Apple) decides to respect you more how long until the winds blow the wrong way and you're back to where you started... being treated like crap.
Even a large company like Google with a lot to offer and a good existing relationship with Apple is being pushed around with this AppStore crap. How exactly would you expect to be treated as a smaller business with little to no leverage with Apple?
I wouldn't agree that the iPhone is a phone first. How many people bought an iPhone so that they could call or text others? The value proposition of the iPhone is not in its phone features, it's in the smartphone features. The only reason that it doesn't seem to matter is because there is no real rival to the iPhone platform. I do agree that the smartphone market needs more real rivals to the iPhone (I'm kinda wondering how Nokia is fumbling so badly here). If the HTC Hero is as good as it is claimed to be, then maybe the iPhone will see a hit in the hardware division, and Apple will be forced to behave more like a democracy.
