i like the "walled garden"

I read reddit. Lately, I've seen a huge amount of hate towards Apple, Jobs and the iPad. The hate is not unfounded - Apple has literally made it more difficult for talented and creative developers to actually create new apps by instating the following policy in OS 4:

3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).

 
Reddit is by and large a niche community of very talented developers - I can see why everyone's pissed. I've read countless articles about success in the appstore, I've also read a bunch about people getting fubared by the submission process. The question is why? People have made tons of cash from app submissions, customer purchase habits have been largely unpredictable, everybody wants to get in on the cash cow. 

I think the problem starts with the type of people that build the apps vs. the type of people that buy them. Apple products are NOT designed for open-source guru's who want to make love to every piece of complicated, feature rich, console based application that becomes available for their "PC". Apple has built a massive consumer-base by building high quality and intuitive hardware/software. Your new iPad app that let's you buy movie tickets, book a reservation, hail a cab, find a date and check to see if your table is level all via some console UI, isn't something that Apple wants to connect with it's hardware.

Applications are largely purchased via some kind of wow factor - you see your buddy use it, it looks fun or "slick", you download or buy it.  Sure, Jobs has built a walled-garden but inside those walls, things are very lush and wonderful - it's all about quality control. Apple products are not designed for tech gurus bent on technology freedom. Sure, it sounds onerous - but preach it to the 4 Billion application downloads since App store inception. The walled-garden is controllable, scalable and most of all - marketable.

Without selling massive quantities of product, the app store wouldn't have succeeded. Now, the app store is largely driving hardware sales. It's a very immature market, Apple is doing fantastic things with it. Plus, if you don't like it - there are many other platforms you can explore. 

(New Android Application Availability by Month) 

-Mike