Apple has always been hostile to hackers trying to develop for their platform [1] [2]. The iPhone app store has always involved a crapshoot about whether your

Apple has always been hostile to hackers trying to develop for their platform [1] [2]. The iPhone app store has always involved a crapshoot about whether your app will get accepted or stay accepted. I stay far, far away from the Apple ecosystem because it seems like starting out with underpowered hardware, jacking up the price and crippling it with a ton of lockdowns would be shooting yourself in the foot in a competitive market -- and it would be, for any company that doesn't have Apple's marketing genius. I personally don't care about marketing at all, so it doesn't work on me. [1] IMHO, if you're working on any commercial project -- hardware, software, website, whatever -- you want to encourage user-generated innovation as much as possible. Convincing people to build on your product means there are people working to make your product better without you paying them. So it's in your interest to make life as easy as possible for innovators. Maybe this doesn't justify a huge engineering expenditure on features targeted to developers, but it certainly means you shouldn't go out of your way to make life difficult for developers, like Apple's app store approval with its bizarre restrictions and opaque decision process does. [2] That people put up with Apple's crap and develop for their platform anyway is a testament to the hacker spirit. Or maybe to the number of gullible people in this world willing to pay top dollar for Apple phones that create a market. Or perhaps because the first iPhone was in the right place at the right time, disrupted a market that was ripe for disruption, and then network effects make its dominance stable (especially over the short-to-medium term).