App Store Restrictions
March 5, 2011
Developers are being shown that their apps — and their months or years of hard work, and in many cases, their entire businesses — can be yanked by Apple’s whim at any time for reasons that they couldn’t have anticipated or avoided.
It is difficult to fault Apple for taking a percentage of revenue earned from apps sold in their store. The problem is that the App Store is the only way to distribute an iOS app. This is not an inherent limitation in the hardware or software; it is a deliberately engineered restriction built into the iOS.
The iOS is already an incredibly popular development platform. However, Apple could remove the biggest risk of developing for that platform by allowing customers to install apps from web sites through Safari.