That has to be really frustrating as a developer, to know that you could probably prevail in court if you could afford to defend yourself, but since you can't (and they know you can't), the mere threat of a lawsuit is enough to make you fold.
Any sympathetic attorneys out there who might want to help the guy out with a bit of advice at least?
I think the real reason why Apple has kept such tight control over the App Store has nothing to do with the applications or quality, at all. It has to do with iTunes and music locking. If you opened up the device, it's only time before a variety of media players and mp3 syncing mechanisms will appear -- all without DRM, of course and without the restrictions (only sync with one device, etc. etc.) And that is what Apple can't afford to do. It could potentially cannibalize the entire iTunes business unit.
People keep thinking that Apple actually wants DRM or most of the restrictions that come with iTunes. I'm 99% sure it has more to do with the restrictions the music labels impose when licensing the music to them (that's for example why you can get Apps over 3G but not music).
I can't believe the Tetris company actually cares that people clone Tetris. It's the cloned game, there must be 10000 different clones out for every platform in existence
Sure but they might want to release a paid for version for the iPhone. It's a different ball game.
No one in their right mind is going to pay for a tetris game for the PC, but I can see a ton of people paying money for an official tetris game on the iPhone.
If you're going to copy an existing game like tetris/scrabble/etc, you're going to attract trouble.
That AppStore besides being a single point of entry for developers, also sure seems to be the single point of failure, single point of getting booted, not to mention now also a handy single point of litigation for those into that game.
I don't think that's really the problem here. My favorite tetris clone (quinn) was pulled for a while because the developer ran into legal issues with the Tetris Company.
So if Tris wasn't distributed through the app store, this likely would have happened anyway, just mainly involving the developer and the Tetris Company, not those two and Apple included.
Not debating that, but without the AppStore-only solution people still enjoying the game would be able to distribute it to friends and what not without having to deal with the Tetris company.
When the AppStore is the only way to get applications for a non-jailbroken iPhone, you lose that option and having something pulled from the AppStore means it's gone for everyone.
Technically, the developer can distribute it to friends. He's in the iPhone developer program, he can use the ad-hoc distribution method to send it to friends. I suspect if he "released" the source, any person in the program could do the same.
But yes, I understand your point. The app store model has some benefits and some downsides. The simplest thing to do is to just not buy an iPhone or develop for one if you dislike the model. I know that I don't like some aspects of it from both a user and developer perspective, but I like it more than what I had to deal with when I had other smartphones/PDAs.
Any sympathetic attorneys out there who might want to help the guy out with a bit of advice at least?