Over at his new blog, our old TLF colleague Tim Lee has an interesting post up about “The Problem with Top-Down ‘App Stores’” in which he argues that “when app store approval becomes mandatory, it becomes a major impediment to the success of high-tech platforms.” But I have to wonder if the facts support that assertion. Here’s how I commented on his site:
Tim… What I don’t hear you articulating here is your vision of what a “bottom-up” app store would look like and why it would really produce vastly superior results. Nor do I hear you saying anything about the legitimate concerns that the handset makers might have about the security or stability factors associated with certain applications. I’m not saying those problems are extensive, but at the margins they could be real depending on the nature of the program and how it interacts with the handset and/or network.
Second, there needs to be some sense of proportionality here, at least about the iPhone (I can’t speak for the Palm experience). In just a little over a year, there’s been 2 billion downloads of over 85,000 apps from over 125,000 developers. So, when you talk about Apple’s approval process being “plagued by.. problems” and “rejections for trivial or non-sensical reasons” and “long delays in the review process have become a staple of the tech blogosphere” I think you are giving the impression that this is somehow the norm when it is very much the exception to the rule. Perhaps you would be willing to itemize the examples for us. Once you do, I’d appreciate you doing the math on what that looks like as a percentage of the total 85,000 apps that are already out there on the market today. I am willing to bet the result is something like 0.000001%.
Again, a sense of proportionality is really key here. While I am not an Apple fan and agree they have a bit too much of a control streak for my tastes, it’s hard to argue with results. In this case, a closed, top-down system has produced some fairly spectacular results.
I’m sure Tim will have more to say so head over to his blog for more discussion.
Ted Dziuba has penned a humorous and sharp-tongued piece for The Register about last week’s Adblock vs. NoScript fiasco. For those of you who aren’t Firefox junkies, a nasty public spat broke out between the makers of these two very popular Firefox Browser extensions (they are the #1 and #3 most popular downloads respectively). To make a long and complicated story much shorter, basically, NoScript didn’t like Adblock placing them on their list of blacklisted sites and so they fought back by tinkering with the NoScript code to evade the prohibition. Adblock responded by further tinkering with their code to circumvent the circumvention! And then, as they say, words were exchanged.
Thus, a war of words and code took place. In the end, however, it had a (generally) happy ending with NoScript backing down and apologizing. Regardless, Mr. Dzuiba doesn’t like the way things played out:
The real cause of this dispute is something I like to call Nerd Law. Nerd Law is some policy that can only be enforced by a piece of code, a public standard, or terms of service. For example, under no circumstances will a police officer throw you to the ground and introduce you to his friend the Tazer if you crawl a website and disrespect the robots.txt file.
The only way to adjudicate Nerd Law is to write about a transgression on your blog and hope that it gets to the front page of Digg. Nerd Law is the result of the pathological introversion software engineers carry around with them, being too afraid of confrontation after that one time in high school when you stood up to a jock and ended up getting your ass kicked.
Dziuba goes on to suggest that “If you actually talk to people, network, and make agreements, you’ll find that most are reasonable” and, therefore, this confrontation and resulting public fight could have been avoided. They “could have come to a mutually-agreeable solution,” he says.
But no. Sadly, software engineers will do what they were raised to do. And while it may be a really big hullabaloo to a very small subset of people who Twitter and blog their every thought as if anybody cared, to the rest of us, it just reaffirms our knowledge that it’s easy to exploit your average introvert. After all, what’s he gonna do? Blog about it?
OK, so maybe the developers could have come to some sort of an agreement if they had opened direct channels of communications or, better yet, if someone at the Mozilla Foundation could have intervened early on and mediated the dispute. At the end of the day, however, that did not happen and a public “Nerd War” ensued. But I’d like to say a word in defense of Nerd Law and public fights about “a piece of code, a public standard, or terms of service.”
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