I totally support everything this company thinks is the right thing to do. Even their most controversial decisions with time turn out to be very ingenious and beneficial.

if we're to believe developer feedback over the last couple of years, you'd think your sense of the review and approval process AAPL had been employing was, if nothing else, a thorough one.

i guess all that's out the window now...but interested to know how much of this is an affirmative step away from the criteria used to approve submissions originally/previously.

you'd think it wouldn't be too difficult to review things like whether an app simply recreates an inferior web experience, or is simply a regurgitation of an app that exists on another platform...even whether a given app's code is particularly out-of-bounds with respect to leveraging unpub'd APIs.

did somebody just wake up this morning in cupertino and decide to lay the hammer down? you'd think these kinds of objections would've come up against more of a hurdle to begin with... what were they evaluating if NOT this kind of thing? what was driving the publishing delay we'd hear developers complaining about, then?

It's about time; these kinds of App Store abuses have been going on for far too long. Anything that clears the way for legitimate iPhone software is a good thing.

I agree with this decision. Makes sense to me.

I think this is ultimately a good thing. Why does someone need a proprietary iPhone app to look up the current weather, or any other single-dimensional bit of data? If it can be done through a web browser with no extra frills, that's where it belongs. If there's a compelling reason to add some limited extra functionality, make it a web app and distribute it outside the App Store. If it really needs the full Cocoa development suite or low-level hardware access, make it a true iPhone app.

Everything we've accused the Windows ecosystem of in terms of marginalizing the Mac has been reversed with the iPhone. For stuff that doesn't need to be iPhone-proprietary the developers should instead create web apps and be free to sell them as they wish. This will also reduce the number of complaints (not to mention the workload of vetting) that people have of the App Store's policies.

Not only that, those that really need some sort of app to view porn can, and always have been able to, get them outside of the App Store. The buying public just has to be made aware that there are more channels for things than the 'fascist' (etc.) App Store. Let's move on from these tired arguments.

There are a lot of Mac OS X widgets that are little more than RSS feeds wrapped up in a pretty interface too. But those are okay. Hmm. Anyway. Whatever.

Hmm, finally Apple is re-focusing on the fact that quality matters more than quantity!! It's gotten to the point that there are TOO many choices to filter through to find the app you want. Of course defining anything that could be done on the web as a cut off is a bit too broad, as that would cut out a HUGE number of useful apps. The performance benefit of making them an app versus a web app is often reason enough to have them as apps.