The extended downtime, delays at stores, temporary bricking (in many cases during all working hours of today) that seemed to affect the .mac → Mobile Me transition, the iPhone and iPod touch 2.0 firmware release, the iPhone 3G first day of sale at stores and the launch of the App Store altogether have made for negative press. The flak frankly seems deserved to me. Whether they ran into unexpected issues late in the development process, didn’t expect as much demand, or failed to deliver for some other reason, it simply sheds a terrible light on this launch day. Wasn’t one of the three major improvements summarized as “Enterprise support”? Don’t Enterprise™s typically want to, say, actually use their products?

They could have launched Mobile Me next week, or the week before that. Could have launched the App Store some other time. Could have said “hey, we’re just not ready; let’s delay this just a little bit as to make for a smoother initial run”.

This boils down to human error, and other companies would have suffered the same. But maybe they wouldn’t have applied the false pride of doing too many things at once.

I reject the idea that the App Store should serve as a cream-of-the-crop selection of iPhone/iPod touch applications. How, then, would I retrieve applications Apple deems unworthy or subpar? Short of jailbreaking (and special, limited enterprise and ad hoc options), the App Store is the only source of apps, and it is censored enough as it is. It is thus that tweets demanding that Apple be the arbiter of quality not only annoy me; they concern me.

I can sort-of accept the limitations Apple is imposing; they did provide a rationale, more or less (however, why make the DRM mandatory, rather than letting developers choose on their own?). I also hold that Apple tends to have rather good taste in their decisions, and this may very well translate to a rather good selection of third-party applications. But already, the arbitrariness of ‘arbiter’ is showing. Good app? Bad app? You don’t decide. The reviews don’t decide. Apple does, and some people outside the company actually seem to like it that way. Disturbing.