To add to bonzoesc, who likes their product getting hacked? It's a business and they're trying to make money. The business plans on these high profile products

To add to bonzoesc, who likes their product getting hacked? It's a business and they're trying to make money. The business plans on these high profile products with years of dev time are made years in advance. In technology, that's a lifetime, and in hardware doing pivots isn't trivial. There's also very real concerns regarding hacking - i.e. you want to avoid getting the rep for being that company responsible (think Sidekick) for the Paris Hilton situation, where all of hollywood's A-list celebrities phone numbers get leaked onto the internet. You're trying to build a secure device. The business motivations are obvious. Apple builds a good closed system. Google builds a janky open system. Both models work, neither is right or wrong, and both companys go to the bank. And just to put things into perspective, there was no App Store when Apple launched the iphone. I'm pretty sure they never intended for there to be, but once they saw what people were coming up with 'off the ranch' it became fairly obvious to them to let developers develop on their platform. The reason I'm fairly certain Apple had no initial plans for this is simply because, on the version of the first public firmware (and only the first one), everything ran as root user... that's just idiotic.