Why Apple Will Ultimately Lose the Tablet and Phone War

Apple really hit a home-run with their tablet PC the iPad and their mobile phone the iPhone. These two gadgets are extraordinarily wonderful examples of geek toys. With their smooth interfaces, massive libraries of apps, and their ease of configuration of use you would think that Apple is on its way to becoming the powerhouse of mobility as Microsoft is to the PC market. Unfortunately the iPad and the iPhone are doomed to become one more tech toy that will be used by a minority market of Apple fans, and here's why...

There is no denying that Apple has a great product in the iPad and iPhone, problem is that Apple is keeping those platforms under tight control. This is historically Apple's biggest downfall. When the Macintosh first came out it was an amazing system, well beyond its competitors in both features and ease of use, but Apple closed the market down when it came to what hardware would run the Mac OS. Thus the more affordable IBM compatible machines became the defacto standard.

Now with the iPad and iPhone Apple has locked the developers into their proprietary development systems and made developing apps for the iPad and iPhone a massive, expensive, lengthy, and confusing process that will ultimately limit the diversity of applications available to it.

With the requirement that the development environment be run on a Mac system, you cut out a large portion of independent developers that either don't want or need a Macintosh for anything other than developing for the iPad or iPhone, not to mention that Macintosh systems aren't exactly the most cost effective computers in the world to purchase.

With Apple's incredibly complex and hard to follow guidelines to get apps on the app store they also discourage developers from even trying to develop for their system.

While the above arrangements might have been a good business move back with the iPad and iPhone where the only deal on the market... these issues will cause major issues to Apples market share now that the Android system has entered the market.

With the Android's ease of getting apps to market and their open ended development platform eventually Android will not only dominate the app market but it will also have the largest set of developers working to produce apps for it.

If Apple wants to actually win this new tech war they need to open their systems up for developers to actually produce apps, otherwise... the iPad and iPhone are going to fall into the same market that the Macintosh did: Great toys and good home machines, but not really any good for business or users that need to use them in anything but trendy/niche market applications.