It’s no secret that I’m a supporter of Apple and the iPhone, their network partner choice aside. However, that doesn’t mean that I’d like to see them win the market. As much as I enjoy the app store for its ease of use for the consumer, Apple’s content controls are overzealous. Those controls have been brought to light recently because of all the “pr0n on the iPhone” controversies, but they also tend to restrict political and other controversial social content in their mobile app store. Not to mention tethering (mostly AT&T’s call, not Apple’s, but still), which I could have used this week without out the net.

Apple’s app store does have the virtue of being the most accessible mobile application platform. The Palm Pre’s WebOS doesn’t have the penetration, and with the lukewarm reviews, will never likely reach the support of the iPhone. Android based phones allow interesting and easy development for developers, but less of the ease of use for the consumer because nothing reaches the ease of use for consumers like Apple’s app store. Blackberry’s OS and the apps for it are plagued with too many versions to make their applications easy for the developer or the consumer. Competition is good – one company shouldn’t control the whole pie or they can jack both prices and consumers, but there needs to be a standard.

Much like all good web browsers supporting Flash, or the java virtual machine technology for different computer OSs, a standard support for third party mobile applications needs to be built into all mobile OS platforms. Not only would this benefit developers because mobile applications would not need to be messily ported, but consumers would have an easier time maintaining consistency when switching platforms. I could switch from the iPhone to the Palm Pre and still keep my favorite apps.

Understandably, there are barriers to this. Much like the recent problems with Google’s book antitrust and Amazon’s attempt to dominate the book market with their Kindle, no one wants companies to have singular control, no matter how much companies might want it. However, much like HTML or other web standards, a standard development system should be developed so that consumers can buy their apps in any place and have them run on any mobile platform that supports the standard (and they all should). This means that I could get Pandora Radio’s latest app in Apple’s App store, even though if I had a Palm Pre, or vice versa.

The hardware developer (who usually builds the OS, too), should not control the application store for their platform, just like Amazon should not control the device, the software, the format, and the (coming soon!) the content. That, more than anything else, needs to happen first. But secondly, the mobile OS’s should include a standard for application support. Obviously, hardware differs between platforms, both in speed and add-ons (camera, etc.), but this will work itself out in time as more companies embrace the smartphone as a mobile computing system that needs a minimum standard feature set.

Now, I’m not usually one to work out all the details or fix all the problems. I’m a writer and an idea guy, and that’s what I’m about. There are huge problems with this that would need to be worked out. However, it’s a solid idea, and one that should be explored.

-m.

P.S. I want to make an iPhone game (or rather, talk my brother into making one with me while I stand on the sidelines and feature creep him until he gets annoyed) and would prefer to launch it on all platforms instead of just Apple’s. After all, what would we do if they rejected it? Just sit and cry in the corner? Negative, Ghostrider. The pattern should be standard.