This Jimmy Wales story at AppleInsider is very bizarre.
Speaking in a “purely personal capacity” at an event in Bristol, England, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said app stores like Apple’s iOS App Store can act as a “chokepoint that is very dangerous.”
It is time to ask if the model was “a threat to a diverse and open ecosystem,”
Let’s go back in time and see how this developed.
The original iPhone didn’t have any apps and Steve Jobs tells developers to use open web standards to build apps on the web. Jobs says they’d work really, really well and programmers already know the language of the web so they can get started right away. Anybody can make any app they want on the web. Use open standard HTML 5 Jobs says, you’ll make great apps. He even shows off a few samples.
Jobs gets roundly attacked by the usual suspects. Apple is keeping iOS from the developers. Web apps aren’t like local apps. Apple is keeping the computer from us. Apple is unfair.
Bowing to pressure Apple develops an SDK and opens the then iPhone OS up to apps. But the whole thing is a new experience, nobody had really done this on the scale that Apple envisioned and Apple wasn’t sure what was going to happen with all of these apps running on a finely tuned ultra mini computer nee smartphone that they themselves just invented so they (Apple) decide to invigilate this app store as the responsible thing to do in case things (battery life, id theft, viruses, trojans, porn, plagerism, whatever) get out of hand and give the end-user a bad experience because its the end user experience that Apple thinks is overarchingly important. Let me repeat, its the end user that these policies are geared to protect. The typical mass market end-user wants their smartphone to work, they don’t care how open it is to customising because they’re never going to do that kind of customising.
Now Wales attacks Apple for putting an “app chokepoint” on the web which may well damage the open web.
Damned when they followed the open web mantra and then damned when they didn’t.
Wales went on to downplay worry over net neutrality, arguing that many concerns are hypothetical and don’t pose an immediate danger. The campaign for net neutrality has elements that are “highly overblown,” centering more on fears about what might happen than what is happening.
Wales says that Net Neutrality isn’t that big an issue because its mostly a theoretical worry about what might happen and that’s not what is happening. Hang on, didn’t he just criticise Apple because their App Store policy might cause problems for the future of the web? Sounds a bit, hmmm, inconsistent? Like maybe he just has his little cluster of views which are no better thought out than the rest of us.
Jimmy Wales did a great thing in thinking up and growing Wikipedia. It’s a brilliant success. But that doesn’t make him omniscient or insightful, it just gives him a pulpit. With no disrespect for his impressive accomplishments intended, it sounds to me like he’s just mouthing off here.
If app stores kill of the web as we know it, so be it. Nothing remains the same. That geek dream of a free and open internet as the great democratic equaliser is a wonderful vision but its crumbling in a hundred ways from Facebook to persistent cookies to the latest FCC net neutrality ruling with the support of Google and Verizon for treating the mobile web different from the desktop web to Google selling our personal data for profit. The dream is dead. We are where we are. We wouldn’t have chosen this as our starting point but its too late for that.
