Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later. Regardless of who is pulling the strings concerning the Google Voice debacle, developers, iPhone owners, and even journalists are up in arms concerning arbitrary pulling and blocking of iPhone apps.

The question about who to blame is moot at this point. Is AT&T forcing Apple to pull and reject apps? Is Apple using a magic dart board to decide which app lives and which app dies? The real problem is the gigantic wall Apple has built up around the iPhone and the development of iPhone apps. The Google Voice issue just adds new focus to the procedure.

Imagine you're a developer. It might help if you close your eyes. You've seen the video of the Trism developer, Steve Demeter, and how he quit his job and became the richest man in the world thanks to the iTunes App Store. You keep hearing all the success stories of developers raking in huge bags of cash thanks to the App Store. You figure you have a great idea for an app and you're going to get a share of that thar iPhone money out thar in California.

After spending months coding after work, or better yet, quitting your job in order to devote yourself to your new gig full-time, you send your app to Apple for approval. After a few weeks you're contacted and told that your app has been rejected because it violates something in Apple's TOS or it mirrors a feature the iPhone already has. Or worse, it gets accepted, but then a few months down the road you get a new correspondence that your app has been pulled with no real information from Apple on how to proceed with the app to get it back into the store.

That's what happened to the VoiceCentral developers. Their Google Voice app was removed from the App Store with no reason other than it duplicated features of the iPhone.  When the developers pushed an Apple representative for more clarification about the situation, they were met repeatedly with the answer, "It's against our policy." The representative couldn't answer specific questions about the removal, explain how the developer could fix the app as to not run afoul of Apple's policy, or even point the developer to someone else at Apple who could actually help them.  

A developer that had been secure in the knowledge that their app would be available in the App Store until they decided to stop selling it was suddenly being treated like an ex-girlfriend or -boyfriend.

And small developers aren't the only ones being given the brush-off. Google, Apple's technological BFF, is also feeling the sting of an App Store rejection. Their official Google Voice app was rejected by Apple. Google's apps ship with the iPhone -- Maps and YouTube are part of the OS. Google CEO, Eric Schimdt sits on Apple's board. Is this how you treat your BFF?

Apple is shutting off the very people that make the App Store so great, the developers. The incredible apps that appear in the App Store every day are each the hard work of a developer or a team of developers. Without these people, you wouldn't have Peggle, Doddle Jump, Prowl, Tweetie, and others. Developing an app is a huge gamble. Will it sell? Will is perform as envisioned? Will it be rated favorably? Add to that uncertainty the chance that your app will be rejected or pulled with nothing more than a form response, and many developers will begin to abandon the iPhone platform for other smartphone OSes.

Apple can do whatever it wants with its products. As a fan of Apple products, I understand the reasoning behind OS X not being licensed to third-party hardware vendors. The Palm Pre being blocked (and then unblocked by Palm) from iTunes is also understandable from a business perspective. A huge percentage of Apple's hardware sales are based on an exclusive connection with iTunes and the iTunes Store.

It's the App Store that puzzles me. Imagine a world where Apple scrutinizes every app that is created for Mac OS X. Adobe Reader duplicates Preview's features, so it's pulled. VLC plays video, wait a second, so does QuickTime, better pull it. Thunderbird email app, Microsoft Office, Firefox, Adium, all of these apps would be gone if Apple used the same practices it uses with the iPhone. How long would Apple have lasted if they had pulled this from the beginning with the Mac?

Allowing AT&T to dictate what gets pulled and what doesn't, doesn't leave Apple blameless. Apple is still complacent in the decision. And don't for a second believe that a Verizon iPhone will solve these problems. Verizon has a history of blocking phone features in order to up-sell paid features on their network. Passing the blame onto the carrier won't work forever. Apple is in the unique position that if a carrier can't handle the capabilities of the iPhone, there are other carriers that will happily swoop in and enjoy the money being made from iPhone sales and monthly fees.

If Apple continues down this path, the Palm Pre and Android phones will catch up and pass the iPhone.

Should Apple continue to test apps to make sure they don't crash iPhones or bring down the entire telecommunications industry with a bug? Of course they should. Apple's vetting process keeps the worst of the worst out of the App Store. But that vetting process needs to be transparent. Developers need to know what works and what doesn't. An open dialogue with developers is the first step. Telling a developer you can't get into specifics on why an app has been pulled is ridiculous. Allowing a carrier to dictate what runs on your device also needs to stop. If I purchase a 3G modem for my MacBook, the carrier doesn't get to dictate to me what apps I can install on my machine. The same should apply to my mobile phone -- a phone, I might add, that costs more than my home broadband connection per month.

In other words, Apple, tear down the wall of secrecy you've built up around the iPhone and the App Store. The developers will appreciate it, and in the long run, the consumers will too.