We've pretty steadily followed the conventional wisdom regarding comparisons between Apple's extremely closed iPhone app store, especially when compared to Google's promised mostly open Android app store. This is an important topic, as the app stores are wonderful start-up terrain. We've criticized Apple's heavy-handed and capricious stewardship, while praising Google's decision to open up the store, exercising minimal prior restraint on prospective applications. (The T-Mobile G1, the first phone to run Android, comes out October 22.)

But fairness dictates that we present the alternate viewpoint, which has recently been articulated on TechCrunch and on our sister site Slate.

The TechCrunch post, by Dan Kimerling, is less a theoretical defense of Apple's policies and more an instruction to developers to quit whining. "When you create the platform, you set the rules," Kimerling writes. "If Apple wants to restrict iPhone applications to those that do not compete with features built into the iPhone, well, they can go right ahead and do so." Well, yes, but no one's really arguing otherwise. Few say Apple can't do what it's doing; they say it shouldn't.

Kimerling is more persuasive when he points out that Apple can afford to do what it wants with its app store because developers, eyeing the 14 million (and rapidly increasing) iPhones and the iPhone's superior platform and storage space, will continue to develop for the iPhone because the opportunity is too great to worry too much about Apple's strict patrolling of its app store. This is a useful, realistic corrective to the notion that Apple's behavior genuinely endangers the iPhone's dominance, at least in the short-term. Still, it is the luxury of pundits to tell the world what it's doing wrong, and Kimerling fails to persuade that pundits shouldn't continue to tell Apple to loosen its app store.

On the other hand, in Slate, Farhad Manjoo offers a compelling case for closed-sourcedness. He notes that this is not the first time that Apple has taken a closed-source stance, especially in comparison to its competitors: in the early days of the PC, Apple made the decision to make its operating system compatible solely with its own hardware, while Microsoft made its OSs--the Windows systems--compatible with hardware made by Dell, by Gateway, by IBM, and by whomever else. The result was, to be sure, plenty of market dominance; but also far more technical problems. "Your Windows computer crashes more often than your Mac computer," Manjoo says, "because—among many other reasons—Windows has to accommodate a wider variety of hardware. Dell's machines use different hard drives and graphics cards and memory chips than Gateway's, and they're both different from Lenovo's. The Mac OS, meanwhile, has to work on just a small range of Apple's rigorously tested internal components—which is part of the reason it can run so smoothly."

Moving from the past to the present, Manjoo points to Google's other key open-source decision--making Android available for other phones--and wonders about the efficacy and efficiency for developers of designing Android apps when some Android phones will, for example, have a full keyboard, and some will not?

We dunno. There is no need for Apple to be remotely as harsh about its app store as it has been (which Manjoo readily admits). And we have to think that in the long run, the open-source system is going to produce the more exciting apps--or, more than likely, force Apple to make its system more open-source than it currently is.

Still, there is no denying the advantages closed-source systems have historically had. And there is certainly no denying that, for the forseeable future, developers are going to continue to have to take the risk (and maybe hold their noses) and design for the iPhone.