Kennedy said Podcaster takes as long as 3 to 5 minutes to load some menus, that he had to dismiss a confirmation sheet each time he added a new podcast, and that Podcaster's interface is crowded and ugly.

Remember, ugly is an unforgivable sin in the eyes of Apple, which warns developers on its Developer Connection site:

Apple human interface engineers labored painstakingly over every pixel in Aqua, so it’s important that you pay close attention to the details of your application’s Aqua user interface.

Beyond Podcaster's three fatal flaws, writes Kennedy, "there are a few obvious reasons why a platform such as iPhone might choose not to carry an application in its storefront:"

• Chargebacks. Buyers frequently return your product for reasons including buyer's remorse or just receiving a different product than they expected. The "I Am Rich" $1000 iPhone app carries a heavy chargeback risk.
• Insufficient differentiation. App authors should be able to submit an application to App Store and expect there won't be a knock-off product sold directly alongside. Open-source applications can swap out an application title and submit the app as their own without adding new functionality.
• Misleading marketing, including trademarks. Don't misrepresent yourself or your product or cause obvious confusion.
• Horrible customer experience. Apple will recommend interface designers who can assist you with visual aspects of your application. Long load times or heavy resource utilization might will make both you and the platform look bad.

It will be a fad, why? because Jobs has a very narrow mind regarding software, and that means we won't see the kind of cool stuff that PalmOS used to get in the late '90s/early '00s.

The iPhone-as-modem app just got canned, and that was way more useful that most of the crap on the store. Ask any gamer and he'll tell you that using non-physical buttons (like in some DS games) is a nightmare.

After the peak hype, only 10-20 percent of the user base will be buying (instead of just getting the free ones) apps in the store.

Apple only gets to keep 30 percent of that cash — so we're really talking about adding $100 million to Apple's multibillion-dollar bottom line. Jobs said the point isn't for Apple to make money off application sales, but to market them as only available on Apple hardware. "We think, going forward, the phone of the future will be differentiated by software," said Jobs. Videogames maker Sega told the Journal its sold 300,000 copies of Super Monkeyball at $9.99 a pop. "That's a substantial business," Sega exec Simon Jeffery said. "It gives iPhone a justifiable claim to being a viable gaming platform." With all this cash changing hands, we wonder: Why would anybody build widgets for Facebook and not the iPhone?

It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store. We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence.

[Ars Technica] (Photo by Getty Images)