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Apple's iPhone Developer Crisis
David Gerard writes "iPhone development sounds closed-shop but simple — apply to be a developer, put application on the App Store, you and Apple make money. Except Apple can't keep up with the request load — whereas getting a developer contract used to take a couple of days, it's now taking months. Some early developers' contracts are expiring with no notice of renewal options. And Apple has no idea what's going on or the state of things. If you want to maintain a completely closed system, it helps if you can actually keep up with it."
Reader h11:6 points out news of a recent study which suggests that "Android's open source nature will give it a boost over Apple's iPhone," and thus take the lead in sales as soon as three years from now. It will be interesting to see how they deal with the flood of proposed apps as their popularity rises.
"synergy" really? That word is unlikely to convince anyone here. I would say that Apple in no way have built a hardware and software that are integrated together to work seamlessly and intuitively. The fact that iPhones are notorious for crashes and lockups shows that beyond a shadow of a doubt that they do not work together seamlessly, and the fact that you cannot or at least until recently could not download podcasts directly to your phone without first downloading it to a computer shows that it is clearly not intuitive. I have talked to several people who were definitely confused about why web sites didn't work with their phone. Particularly when they would get a button that says download Flash. When they would click on it, they would get a message saying that the phone couldn't do it. This is definitely not intuitive.
The iPhone is not a success because it is a great product. It is a success because Apple has great marketing, a fanatical generally well to do fanboy base, it is an upgrade to an existing popular product, it looks good, and it is a reasonably good product in it's own right, even if it has some major and obvious flaws.