Yes we do.
The difference.

Due Process.

Whether the control is before OR after isn’t necessarily the issue.
It’s the lack of due process, with Apple, msoft, or any corporate entity
acting as judge, jury, and executioner without oversight or Due Process.
Apple, or ANY other corporation WILL misuse features like this for their
own benefit, without the programmer ( or customer ) having any recourse
or any say in the matter.

This will be abused by Apple.

Do you want Apple to have dictatorial control BEFORE or AFTER an application is offered to the public? Control BEFORE would force Apple to vet every application and decide what can be sold online. Apple doesn’t have the employees necessary to do that. It isn’t as though Apple is making a bundle off of selling Music or Apps.

Moreover, I could hear the cries of “Censorship!” from developers if Apple did that.

Control AFTER allows people the freedom to choose, at their own risk. If Apple allows the developers the freedom to post their Apps then some of the Apps will prove unsatisfactory. Some Apps will be malicious and steal your private data. Some will be overpriced. Others will just be rotten, get a bad reputation and never be sold. Some applications will break State or Federal laws.

A mechanism is necessary to control that. Developers won’t invest the time and effort to make “good applications” unless they can profit from it.

What Apple wants is an orderly market. This means one that mostly polices itself. But, setting up such a market is difficult, since it is always done through trial and error. There will be people on the sidelines constantly saying, “Apple should do this! Apple should do that!” If we are to have freedom, then Apple needs to do the minimum and allow the market to say where the breaks are.

This means that people have to get burned, swindled and disappointed before the market mechanisms are created. We have laws against horse thieves, because horses have been stolen. We have police to catch and courts to punish horse thieves, because these are corrective actions. If there were no horses or thieves, there would be no need for the laws.

This is a brand new market. Apple is right in allowing the App Store the freedom to act. But, Apple needs to promote standards for developers and customers to follow. They are simply a statements of, “If you do this–your application will get jerked.”

Of course, the time to set up those standards is beforehand, but the standards will evolve as time goes on. This is an imperfect world, folks. And Steve Jobs is a merchant, not God.

Al – It’s true that Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft control theirs software but there is an easy solution to that problem. Unplug thy system. The phone kinda needs the network to work but I can play GTA IV offline.

I think that they fled because, like me, they prefer a ‘reach around’ to a ‘reach into.’