As best I can tell: Point 1) Normal people (people you and I know but aren't) buy iPhones because they're "cool", or they look neat, or they are known to be ea

As best I can tell: Point 1) Normal people (people you and I know but aren't) buy iPhones because they're "cool", or they look neat, or they are known to be easy to use. Point 2) There is essentially no competition on all three of the attributes in #1 -- every competitor falls down in at least one major way: The Series 60 brand is in too many devices for any one of them to have substantial mindshare, Windows mobile is a kludgy UI mess, the Blackberry browser is atrocious, Android is still too boutique, etc. Apple has a clear story anyone can understand: "Buy our [one] phone. You can use [all of] the features it has." Nobody else can really say that. Point 3) As neat as the App Store is, it's a geek/gee whiz feature. The iPhone sold incredibly well with 1.0 software, and the app store seemed almost like a grudging concession to geeks (remember "the browser is great! you should just use web apps!"? ). People that buy iPhones go "oh, that's cool too" and buy $0.99 applications that show glasses of beer that tip when the phone is rotated -- things that are not reasons to buy or not buy a phone. The app store isn't key to the iPhone story. Point 4) Apple would get a lot of bad (general) press for certain categories of application, but will only get a negligible amount of bad technical press for swatting applications, even arbitrarily. Of that bad technical press, half of the people will write it off as Apple haters having their way, regardless of the merits. Point 5) Sometimes it's hard to see the world-changing effects of an application. It's easy to imagine how an application might jeapordize #1 or #2. Point 4 authorizes heavy moderating. Points 1 and 2 serve to protect Apple's top line revenue from same. Point 5 supports capricious moderating. Point 3 isn't enough to prevent them from doing so. Until there's real, compelling competition (meaning at the OS level, point 1, and at the device level, point 2), I would expect this to continue.