Hate Apple’s App Store? Developing for Kindle won’t be any freer

If you thought Apple’s iPhone development model was restrictive, brace yourself for Amazon.com’s. Even as Steve Jobs made headlines with the iPad, a device that promises to add e-books to Apple’s online media empire, Amazon.com stole some wind from his sails with an announcement of its own. The Kindle Development Kit, due to enter limited beta later this month, will open up Amazon’s e-reader platform to outside developers for the first time. But if potential Kindle developers were hoping for a free-for-all platform, they’d better think again.

Apple has been criticized in recent months for the tightfisted control it maintains over its App Store, which is the only officially sanctioned retail channel for iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad apps. Developers have complained that the approval process for new apps is inordinately long, and that apps have been rejected from the store for seemingly arbitrary or capricious reasons.

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Far from being an object lesson in overzealous management, however, the App Store seems destined to be the model for other consumer electronics vendors, including Amazon.com. The online retailer shows every indication that it will follow Apple’s example when it opens the Kindle Store to developers later this year, and there are signs that the Kindle platform will be even more restrictive than Apple’s. In so doing, Amazon.com is writing the next chapter in the ongoing story of the struggle between independent developers and platform vendors for control of the computing market.

Opening Kindle’s kimono (sort of) Increasingly, a thriving developer community is considered a key to the success of any new consumer electronics device. Because the iPad is based on the same OS as the iPhone and iPod Touch and shares those devices’ ARM processor architecture, it can run almost any of the thousands of apps already available for its smaller cousins. Apple is betting that this rich software market will make the iPad seem like a better value than the Kindle, which so far has been limited to e-book viewing.

But if Amazon.com now recognizes the value of third-party software on its Kindle platform, it’s in no hurry to beat Apple at its own game. The initial beta period for the Kindle Development Kit will be invite-only, to be gradually widened later. Details are scanty. We are told that beta participants will be supplied with tools, documentation, and a Kindle emulator, but beyond the likelihood that the Development Kit will be based on Java and Eclipse, the actual APIs that will be available are unknown.

Suggested Kindle apps include word games, puzzles, smart cookbooks, and location-based travel guides. “We look forward to being surprised by what developers invent,” says Ian Freed, Amazon’s vice president for Kindle.

Amazon.com’s terse developer guidelines, on the other hand, say more about what Kindle developers cannot do than what they can. VoIP software is banned, as are “generic readers” that could bypass Amazon.com’s DRM-centric sales model. Encouragingly, advertising and apps that collect information about customers without their express consent are not allowed, but neither are “offensive materials,” which is a troubling sentiment coming from one of the nation’s largest booksellers.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Amazon.com’s announcement, however, is its language. It refers to “applications” several times, but only in the context of another term: “active content.” It seems the programmatic nature of Kindle apps is meant to be secondary to their role in providing media to the customer. Kindle developers won’t be writing Kindle software; they’ll be authoring content that is not static. The fact that this might involve writing some Java code is only an ancillary concern.

It’s an electronic book, not a PC Amazon.com’s walled-garden view of its developer ecosystem is one that will become increasingly prevalent in the post-PC era. The Kindle was not conceived as a general-purpose computing device, and Amazon.com does not intend it to become one. By opening its platform to independent developers, it hopes to increase the perceived value of the Kindle to consumers, but only so long as developers stay “on message.” That’s sure to be a disappointment to developers who are troubled by Apple’s model and who long for the freedom of the early PC software market.

On the other hand, if there’s a bright side to Amazon.com’s approach, it’s that the Kindle brand does not risk becoming muddied by conflicting messages. The Kindle is foremost a reading device, and its active content applications don’t seem likely to stray far from that mission. By comparison, one criticism of the iPad is that it doesn’t seem to do any one thing well enough to make it attractive for the price. With its thousands of games and other apps, Apple’s “Jesus tablet” seems so determined to be all things to all people — without offering anything truly new — that it risks not finding a market at all. (We’ll see once it starts shipping in April.)

Whether or not you agree with such tightly controlled developer programs, the reality is that today’s developers must partner with platform vendors like never before. This is becoming true on desktop operating systems as well as devices — witness Windows with .Net, or Mac OS X with its APIs based on Objective-C. Platform vendors provide opportunities for independent developers, but only so long as developers play by their rules.

Need I remind anyone that Richard Stallman told us so?

This article, “Hate Apple’s App Store? Developing for Kindle won’t be any freer,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest news in software development at InfoWorld.com.