With many channels alight on what people think of the new developer agreement forcing developers to write in “Objective-C, C, C++,or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine” you can read John Grubers excellent pieces on what changed and his thoughts on why.
Steve if you believe replied to emails sent stating
“We’ve been there before, and intermediate layers between the platform and the developer ultimately produces sub-standard apps and hinders the progress of the platform.”
Far greater than how something has been written is the problem of shovelware, whilst it allows the store to quote very large numbers of applications compared to the competitors of the app store, how many companies are submitting multiple applications every day of debatable quality or at least that could be combined together. Some of the worst offending companies have been removed from the developer program
So ignoring the arguments on whether what Apple is doing with the new terms in the sdk agreement is right or wrong and what effect it has on native cross platform app development. I was thinking what else they could do for the submission process for their platform if the stated aim is simply to raise the standard of apps, regardless of how they are produced.
One of the reasons for me that the app store has been a success for developers, has been how much easier it is to make an application available to the paid market globally, unfortunately this has meant the friction barrier is so low, that it allows for shovelware to be a positive revenue generating tatic. Thankfully this is actually quite an easy one to stop by implementing a cost barrier like Palm have on their app catalog, quite simply if you wish to make an application available there is a $50 cost. This simple barrier to entry means if the developer doesn’t believe their application is going to return at least $50 they will be unlikely to submit it or burn through cash and be stopped that way.