Is Apple Putting a Damper on Internet Innovation?
Apple’s “Let’s talk iPhone” event last Tuesday sent the Internet into a tizzy. The introduction of the next generation iPhone caused such a stampede of traffic across the web that part of the Internet halted.
Major sites like Facebook.com and NYTimes.com momentarily shut down due to overloaded servers because of the Apple announcement.
It’s not uncommon for sites to temporarily crash with an extreme overload of hits. However, some technology experts are asking the question: Is Apple harming the Internet in acute ways other than momentary shutdowns?
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Tech executives and industry experts say that open-source software expanded the idea of open Internet innovation by enabling web developers to co-work on a single product sans the usual gatekeepers known for regulating speech.
But surprisingly, Apple, the company known for digital novelty, has some web developers saying their creativity has been muted in some ways by becoming the sole go-between for developers and iPhone users.
"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," Zeke Shore, the Co-Founder and Creative Director of design firm Type/Code told IBTimes.
Developer and tech blogger Joe Hewitt told IBT that Apple does very little to monitor apps for bugs. In a personal assessment of the tech-savvy company, Hewitt advises Apple to eliminate the App Store review process in order to foster more diverse application development.
On his blog, Hewitt wrote, "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."
"They don't trust us (developers) and I resent that, because the vast majority of us are trustworthy," added Hewitt who quit his iPhone development projects and went back to Web development.
According to IBT, 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.
