TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Fraser Speirs, creator of the great Exposure iPhone app, explains why Apple is making a huge mistake in rejecting applications for “duplicating functionality”:

Writing software is a serious investment of time and energy. It also carries the opportunity cost of the other things you could have built. We live in a capitalist economy. Under capitalism, profit is the reward for economic risk. Without a reasonable expectation of profit, the sensible business-person will not invest. Without investment and risk-taking, there is no innovation.”

I, and the rest of the Mac community, was enamored with the iPhone’s potential as a platform in the run-up to July 11th. I wrote in June that the iPhone is becoming Apple’s Mac for the 21st century, their central stool leg if you use Jobs’s analogy. I think this is still true — but how Apple is handling the App Store could give Android a large competitive advantage.

The iPhone is now, whether Apple intended it to be or not, a platform, and will succeed or fail on that basis. That means the iPhone’s success now depends as much on Apple as it does its developers, and Apple is, unfortunately, giving developers good reasons not to develop for the iPhone.

The NDA issue is still not resolved (and now we are stuck with the chock-lock as a result), it takes too much time for app updates to go live on the App Store, and most damaging, Apple has no clear guidelines for rejecting applications.

Why would a developer spend weeks or months of their time developing an application that Apple may reject because it “duplicates” functionality, or if it may be rejected in the future if Apple builds new functionality into the iPhone? Why would a developer take the time to develop a great application when it may not even make it onto the store?

Ironically, if Apple continues down this path of rejecting apps that duplicate functionality or have limited utility, that’s all the app store will be, because very few developers will take the requisite risk involved in developing a well-thought out, well-designed application. All the App Store will be is a list of games and koi ponds, and if that is what happens, the iPhone will fail.

If Apple wants the iPhone to succeed as a platform, they must, as Speirs calls for, develop clear, unambiguous guidelines for what is and is not acceptable in the App Store, and they must follow them religiously. A platform is about trust — developers need to know that the ground rules are followed, and that Apple is looking out for their interests.

Unfortunately, right now, that is just not the case.

(Via Shaun Inman.)