Sure developers will play ball as long as Apple is where the money is. There's no doubt that iOS's amazing run of exponential growth and the creation of a distribution platform as frictionless as the App Store have been irresistible to developers.
However I think it's also fair to say that early adopters and developers were key to Apple's recent success. For instance, OS X lured me back to Macs from Windows in 2000 largely on the promise of unix under the hood. Many early iPhone users were jail breakers either to develop apps or to use them. Developers were on the forefront of Apple success, and I think it's impossible to quantify the impact that we had, and thus extremely easy to underestimate it.
It's true that Apple is very mass market and could not achieve it's design excellence by listening to geek feature requests, but I think they'd better tread lightly on the larger issues. If they turn OS X into a toy OS that doesn't allow serious development and pushing the technological envelope, and all future innovation comes exclusively in the form of Apple new APIs, then I think that will be a harbinger of Apple decline as the geeks and early adopters look for the next frontier. Apple without the hacker community is not nearly as strong as it is today.
However I think it's also fair to say that early adopters and developers were key to Apple's recent success. For instance, OS X lured me back to Macs from Windows in 2000 largely on the promise of unix under the hood. Many early iPhone users were jail breakers either to develop apps or to use them. Developers were on the forefront of Apple success, and I think it's impossible to quantify the impact that we had, and thus extremely easy to underestimate it.
It's true that Apple is very mass market and could not achieve it's design excellence by listening to geek feature requests, but I think they'd better tread lightly on the larger issues. If they turn OS X into a toy OS that doesn't allow serious development and pushing the technological envelope, and all future innovation comes exclusively in the form of Apple new APIs, then I think that will be a harbinger of Apple decline as the geeks and early adopters look for the next frontier. Apple without the hacker community is not nearly as strong as it is today.