A few months back I posted that Apple’s tight control over the iPhone platform, combined with their flaky and frustrating App Store approval process would, at some point, begin to hurt the platform. At the time there was some degree of criticism in the comments. A number of observations were made that it was only those of us who are super involved in the tech world will actually care about the situation. Well, a few months later, I’m back to say that while there are now over 100,000 applications in the app store and Apple grabbed over 17% of the worldwide smartphone market last quarter, we are beginning to see the backlash.

First it was the developer behind the Facebook application jumping from the OSX iPhone ship. The application is a huge hit and more and more Facebook users are accessing the site through their iPhones and iPod touches. That success, however, isn’t enough for him to want to continue to fight with Apple at the step of the way. And so he has thrown in the towel with regard to the iPhone and passed on the project to someone else. He’s still developing mobile apps… just not for the iPhone. (And if you have used the Facebook app you KNOW that this is a huge loos- he is good at what he does!!)

Now today we hear that the developers over at Rogue Amoeba, well-known Mac developers, are following in his footsteps.

They submitted an update to one of their applications after they discovered that it had a few bugs that need fixing. All the update was was a bug fix for an application that Apple had already approved. Yet Apple now rejected the application. The issue? The application would identify the source of the audio being recorded (it is an audio-recording app) and then display the image of the source- often a Mac. That, in itself, is a breach of Apple’s trademark policy. That’s right, you can’t even depict an Apple product in your app.

As they wrote…

In the future, we hope that developers will be allowed to ship software without needing Apple’s approval at all, the same way we do on Mac OS X. We hope the App Store will get better, review times will be shorter, reviews will be more intelligent, and that we can all focus on making great software. Right now, however, the platform is a mess.

The chorus of disenchanted developers is growing and we’re adding our voices as well. Rogue Amoeba no longer has any plans for additional iPhone applications, and updates to our existing iPhone applications will likely be rare. The iPhone platform had great promise, but that promise is not enough, so we’re focusing on the Mac.

Now before you jump on me hear me out. I KNOW this is just two developers out of hundreds and thousands but it is two serious developers who WANT to help make the platform stronger but just can’t deal with it any longer. There is no way the developers who churn out fart apps and the like are going anywhere. Serious developers, however, the ones who put huge effort into making great apps and rely upon those apps to make a living, can and as we have seen, will only put up with so much.

Here’s hoping this isn’t the start of a trend! But if Apple doesn’t loosen up a bit it just might be.

Fortunately I’m too mature a person to say “Told you so” if it does. (Oh, but if it does… told you so!)