Just over a year in to the appstore, the success of it exceeded everyone’s expectations, including those of Steve Jobs. However, a couple of recent stories suggest that developers are having a bit of a tough time with Apple.

It was quite widely reported that the appstore’s recently banned one of it’s most prolific developer, claiming there were breaches of intellectual property rights. What was interesting is that they didn’t just ban one or two offending applications, but according to reports, they removed all of them. Other app developers may be pleased at the banning as the products largely consisted of basic feeds and no real development. These numerous apps could be seen to clogg up the store making it harder for other developers work to be found.

More significantly was the removal of a voice application by VoiceCentral built by a highly reputable developer,  Riverturn. The blog about this is interesting, as Apple offered no full explanation other than that it was similar to iphone products. This was in spite of the fact that the app had been previously approved by Apple, and there are other voice applications in the store.

The significance of this is that Apple, having created great demand, now appear to be rather draconian in the way they work with the third party developers. Whilst maintaining quality in the appstore is important to it’s continued success, Apple’s approach to more quality developers will simply drive them to focus on other platforms such as Android and Blackberry. The latter,  after all, has a much larger market share.

Further information on iphone apps:

iphone demographics revealed

mobile marketing and the iphone