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> Which pretty much sums up the entire reason for 3.3.1.

Apple isn't so much concerned with people porting iPhone apps to other platforms as they are apps targeting a lowest common denominator feature set, or targeting a meta-platform feature set instead of the iPhone SDK feature set.

I just semi-ranted about this on reddit, but my best example at the moment relates to the "XBOX Live" features coming for games in iPhone OS 4. What motivation would Adobe have to Adopt these features in CS5? How long would it take Adobe to adopt these features (if at all)? What if Adobe instead wanted to create their own "XBOX Live" system? Apple would be at the whim of the business interest of the meta-platform, much like they are with Flash on OSX.

After all, Flash devs are going to stay Flash devs, they're not going to port everything to Obj-C just to get one or two features on one platform they're deploying on, they're going to stick with what their meta-platform provides. Apple knows this and they don't want to be stuck the hoping meta-platform want's to move at the same pace they do.

Thats what Apple is talking about when they say these cross-platform apps suck, and if you look at the big ones out there for the desktop (eg, Eclipse, Firefox), they're right, those apps don't take advantage of the OSX features (CoreData, CoreAnimation, GrandCentral), they take advantage of the meta-platform features.

Couldn't agree more.

That is exactly the situation that Apple wants to head off. Apple wants iPhone and iPad applications to fully integrate with the infrastructure they are providing such as fast task switching, social gaming and iAd.

Any sane iPhone developer knew this going in, and really doesn't care

This is the "No True Scotsman" fallacy at work. The word "sane" is doing too much work in that sentence. Certainly a lot of iPhone developers got into the work because they honestly loved the platform, and wanted to code to what they used themselves. I think arguably it's this population that is responsible for most of the real innovation (as opposed to yet another racing game, say).

And its these folks are the ones who have been burned most by 3.3.1. To write them off as "insane" is missing a big part of the picture, I think...

I see your point, but I stand by the choice - any process that actually has an group of people sit there and review your app by hand could only have been seen as "open" by very naive individuals.

> I suspect the correct way to view the iPhone store is not "A horribly closed environment compared to e.g. Windows/the Web", but "A largely open market compared to the PS3/Wii etc"

Very good argument; a perspective that needs to be taken into account.

I think the "correct" way to view the iPhone store is to be both.