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To answer my rhetorical question: maybe. The difference (for now) is that I actually like the products apple makes, so I am not too upset by apple’s somewhat insane approach to locking down the iphone.

This random person is concerned that the reason there is no flash on the iphone is that apple is afraid of losing revenue to AIR apps:

What does this have to do with Adobe Flash and the fact I can’t get it on my iPhone?  Somewhere, I read that the SDK prohibits you from placing an interpreter on the iPhone.  That’s when the light bulb went off.  Flash is an interpreter.  Why would Apple care?…Putting it into Apple’s terms, if they let Flash onto the iPhone, you pay them once for that application, and then you’ll have a backdoor through which any Flash/Flex application can gain entry without having to pass through the Application Store.  It’s a revenue leak of biblical proportions, and one the market would be sure to exploit.

Apple may well be pursuing a Gillette approach with the app store, but I find this unlikely. First, this assumes they are going to sell the iPhone 3G at a loss. They aren’t, the carriers are taking the loss and making the profit on the two year contract (apple gave up the old rev share so the carriers could be sure to make money on that deal).

Second, the Gillette model works like this: sell the razor at a loss, make your profit on blades. In that model if someone else could sell blades that work on your razor it would break your business model. The reason the new activation scheme is much stricter is that unlockers will break the business model of the carriers, not apple. If you walk off with a phone but don’t sign up for service AT&T is out $200 (or whatever the subsidy is).

Apple cares about unlocking not to protect their business (after all, you bought the phone so they got your money already) but to protect the business of the carriers. If the carriers felt the phone was a loser they would do what they could to stop it from selling hurting apple’s sales. 

I don’t know if apple really prevents you from writing an interpreter. But if they do its not because they are afraid of losing revenue from app sales, but because they are worried about people writing VOIP apps that run over 3G–something AT&T is really concerned about (stupidly, in my opinion, but there you are). If you can install a VM on the iphone you can run VOIP past all the safeguards they probably installed. Apple is protecting AT&T and the other carriers. Believe me, they aren’t afraid of all the awesome AIR apps people are going to write. They are afraid of pissing off the carriers.

The iphone is locked down. It always will be. But I don’t think the app store is supposed to be a huge revenue generator for apple. Its supposed to be away to encourage people to buy iphones, which is where apple makes their profit. If you don’t like it, don’t develop for it and don’t use it.

Or, even better, write web apps! Web apps will run on iphone, android, winmo, blackberry et al….vendor lock in be damned.