I was going to develop for the iPhone, but I'm no longer considering it.

I am not the only one in this boat, there are a number of others of a higher profile than mine (not a hard status to reach ;) ) that have thrown up their arms in disgust at the behaviour of Apple with regards to developers, however the voices we have heard sing this tune before have been established entities, well travelled in the arena of iPhone development. On the other hand I was just beginning, but without even having to go through the horrendous approval process I decided this was not the place to be.

To call myself an iPhone developer would be a small lie, I never really got the chance to release an app, with Apple's aggressive protectionism over its own market share it murdered any desire I had to affiliate with them long before anything came to fruition.

The iPhone was the first Apple product I ever purchased; I shunned the iPod, far too expensive, and iTunes is a chore, not a service (in comparison to the ease of drag and drop song migration). The Mac, attractively designed, unfortunately delivered nothing of worth to me.  "Desktop Publishing" is not my industry. Then the iPhone came along. Which I also wrote off and ignored for a while, but University compelled me to create games, and armed with a fervent desire to take part in Dare To Be Digital, I hatched schemes for Apple's mobile.

This wishful thinking was abruptly terminated on discovering that now not only do I have to pay for the privilege of having a testing tool (the phone itself), not only do Apple skim off the top of app developer profits, unsatisfied even with having to make the small developers bow and scrape before even having their software distributed. Apple crossed the line when they ordained from on high that everyone must code the way we want, using the tools that we sell, or there's no deal.

Of course this boils down to, buying more Apple products, which I won't do I am still a student and can only throw so much away on optimistic ventures. I'm wondering though if Apple cares about the people turned away at their now intimidating gates.

They have already attracted the horses to water, they have their end users eating out of their palm. On the development end the big boys like EA and GameLoft are already on board. but its the little developers, and the newcomers who are faced with steep barriers to entry, only to be followed with round after round of hoop jumping. This is not sustainable.

In comparison Microsoft the apparent herald of evil, throw their development tools at the prospective  developers of the future. As a student I am part of the MSDN Academic Alliance, and get relevant licenses freely, for example professional versions of Windows 7, and more importantly Visual Studio 2010.

In a similar vein Android developer phones are offered to those with a developer license (small fee for acquiring this)  at an acceptable discount. but as far as software goes, it's all open source.

This has all led me to ridding myself of the iPhone, to replace it with an Android, I'm currently learning the ropes and aim to chart my progress here (hopefully leading to something game-flavoured)