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By Chris Meadows

Much has been made of how Apple’s closed iPhone/iPod Touch ecosystem limits consumer choice, and its culture of secrecy can make developing for it an exercise in frustration. Most recently, Apple’s decision to remove Google’s and third-parties’ iPhone applications for Google Voice raised eyebrows across the Internet. (Blogger Anil Dash has written a polemic against this unnecessary secrecy that should be required reading for all Apple executives.)

But since the iPhone is a phone, and the Google Voice application also touches upon issues of telephony, that means there is a powerful advocate in consumers’ corner in the form of the Federal Communications Commission. And the FCC has taken an interest in the matter of the Google Voice rejections: it has sent letters to Apple, AT&T, and Google asking them to explain their roles in the Google Voice application rejection and how it relates to other rejected iPhone applications.

It’s one thing for Apple to maintain its “we can’t tell you that” silence in regard to the pleas of developers to find out what they did wrong. Hopefully, it will be quite another thing for it to keep mum in the face of a government inquiry. It will be interesting to see what Apple’s explanations are.

It’s only too bad that e-book application developers don’t have the same recourse.

 
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