I agree with the sentiments over on osnews.com, where there’s a brief discussion of Apple‘s refusal to allow Opera to appear in the Apple Apps store because it ‘competes’ with one of their products. This is hardly the first example of Apple doing this and using this justification. This is counter to Apple’s interests in my opinion, and seems to demonstrate a refusal to learn the lessons of the past. One of the absolutely fantastic things about the iphone/ipod touch is the breadth of application availability – finally, cell phones are starting to feel like the little handheld computers they are. Don’t presume to decide for me what software I want to run on it, that’s what the cell phone carriers have been doing for over a decade. If I want to run some other browser, LET ME. Compete on the basis of merits, not by exercising your monopoly power on the platform. Google‘s Android platform is out, the source is open, and hopefully they’ll force Apple’s hand on this issue. If not, maybe my next phone will be an Android phone, not an Apple one…or maybe I’ll jailbreak an iphone.

[update] Turns out this story has been widely misreported – note this piece over on daringfireball.net revealing that Apple has not in fact denied Opera. I believe the gist of my post above remains true though – Apple is denying software access to their platform and doing so is not in their interests.