Adam, I don’t know that the numbers you’ve given are useful metrics in this context. I’m willing to concede that the iPhone is a wildly successful product and that the percentage of applications being rejected for spurious reasons is tiny, even taking into account the points Tim made about developers having a strong incentive to remain silent. The problem is that these numbers don’t prove that the iPhone wouldn’t be an even better platform if it were more open; it only proves that it is a very successful product as it is.

You also mentioned security and stability as important factors to consider. There’s a concept in security called “security through obscurity.” The point of it is simple: just being a closed or obscure platform doesn’t give you perfect, complete security. Security is all about risk, and ‘obscurity’ is just one element of risk management. All we can generally say about switching from a closed to an open platform is that the risks (and therefore the security considerations) will change, sometimes dramatically.

In this case, it makes sense to me from a security and stability standpoint to open up the iPhone platform because the iPhone’s OS is basically a port of Mac OS X, which was originally designed to be an open platform. Apple clearly wants engineers to be able to easily build applications for both platforms moving forward. It’s hard enough to design secure software when you are only dealing with either an open platform or a closed platform, so why put your engineers in the position of building secure software for both situations at the same time?

Apple could try to get (some of) the best of both the open and the closed worlds by having different classifications for applications. I’m thinking of something similar to the “components” system that Ubuntu uses. This means they could have a set of applications that are approved in whatever process they want to use and as many sets of ‘unapproved’ or ‘experimental’ applications.

Apple could even set it up so that users wanting to use unapproved applications would have to disclaim liability for the security of their data or the stability of their system. This seems reasonable to me. If you give users the power to approve of and install their own applications, then they should take personal responsibility for the consequences, if any.

Those are just a couple suggestions. I don’t have a problem with Apple doing whatever they want — it’s their product, but then, it doesn’t look like Tim has a problem with that either. He’s just arguing that the top-down approach to the App Store is not as good as a bottom-up approach would be.

A bottom-up market for iPhone applications would be one in which developers were free to distribute their applications directly to users. If that were the case, then it wouldn’t matter too much what policies Apple had in the official app store, because customers would be free to bypass it if it didn’t suit their purposes.

As for Apple’s success in attracting developers, I my sense is that this is despite, rather than because of, the way they treat developers. The fact that 85,000 developers have gotten their applications into the app store doesn’t tell us anything about how much frustration they experienced in the process, or how many more applications Apple would have if they didn’t jerk their developers around so much. I’m not an iPhone developer, so I don’t have first-hand experience, but stories like this one suggest that there’s a lot of dissatisfaction.

As for the number of complaints, it would be surprising if a significant fraction of disaffected iPhone developers went public given that Apple has them by the balls. If you start bad-mouthing Apple, will they hold up your next iPhone app? Probably not, but why take the chance? So I suspect there are a dozen privately disaffected developers for everyone who’s gone public.

As for the security and bandwidth concerns, I don’t really have a strong opinion about that. Maybe some restrictions are justified by these concerns, although I’m skeptical. My point is simply that top-down management imposes significant costs, and platform builders need to take those costs into account. If they can find a way to build an open platform, that platform is going to do better than the same technology as a closed platform.

Second, there needs to be some sense of proportionality here, at least about the iPhone (I can’t speak for the Palm experience). In just a little over a year, there’s been 2 billion downloads of over 85,000 apps from over 125,000 developers.

So, when you talk about Apple’s approval process being “plagued by.. problems” and “rejections for trivial or non-sensical reasons” and “long delays in the review process have become a staple of the tech blogosphere” I think you are giving the impression that this is somehow the norm when it is very much the exception to the rule. Perhaps you would be willing to itemize the examples for us. Once you do, I’d appreciate you doing the math on what that looks like as a percentage of the total 85,000 apps that are out there today. I am willing to be the result is something like 0.000001%.

Again, a sense of proportionality is really key here. While I am not an Apple fan and agree they have a bit too much of a control streak for my tastes, it’s hard to argue with results. In this case, a closed, top-down system has produced some fairly spectacular results.