It occurs to me that Apple has created, perhaps by accident, something of a controlled experiment in terms of determining the pros and cons of different approaches to managing the user experience on a platform.
On the one side we have the Mac App Store, where users can choose to get their apps through Apple’s channel or any other way they please, and developers can choose to distribute their wares through the Mac App Store or any other way they please.
On the other side we have the iOS App Store, where users can (modulo “jail-breaking”) only get their apps through Apple’s channel, and developers can only distribute their wares through Apple’s channel.
Obviously this isn’t a perfect experiment — it’s the real world after all. iOS and Mac OS X are different platforms with different users, different use-cases, and very different use-histories. But I suspect it’s a good enough experiment that the outcomes are guaranteed to impact both platforms.
I think it’s safe to say that if the iOS ecosystem worked the way the Mac ecosystem did, then pretty much all the complaints about the App Store would disappear. (This doesn’t mean a whole bunch of new complaints wouldn’t appear, of course.) Right now, the Mac ecosystem seems like an ideal world. You can opt in to the “walled garden” or go hog wild with warez downloaded by bittorrent. As a parent, I’d love to have OS-level support for keeping your computers in the walled garden. And, as someone working in a library, I’d love public access computers to allow users to download and use their apps legally, and then remove them when the user logged out.
So, let’s suppose that the Mac App Store turns out to “vacuum up” more-or-less all of indy development community. If we see a huge proportion of developers voluntarily opting in to the App Store because the revenues are so much better there (which in turn would mean that users are flocking to it), Apple might be encouraged to either (a) make the walled garden mandatory on Mac OS X, or (b) relax the walled garden for iOS. Or some combination of the two — e.g. AppleCare might require you to stay inside the walled garden.
Apple doesn’t need to “vacuum up” the big guys because it’s fairly easy to deal with a few large vendors (e.g. create specific technical or legal exceptions for them). It’s the long tail of software developers that are difficult to deal with. Apple isn’t worried, for example, that Adobe might produce a version of Photoshop that is actually a trojan. (OK, maybe it’s a little worried.) But there’s no way to keep track of hundreds of thousands of tiny developers who might, at any time, either create a trojan or have a trojan made to look like one of their programs, e.g. a long, long time ago — when indy software was largely distributed on floppy disks by user groups — there was a trojan purporting to be Stuffit 2.0. The developer — a high school student at the time — hadn’t released an update for a long time because he was studying for exams, and ended up having to make announcements that there would never be a legitimate Stuffit 2.0.
So: watch this space. OS X and iOS are destined to merge or just look a lot more similar as time goes on. The question is whether (and in what respects) iOS becomes more like OS X and vice versa.