The battle between the iPhone and the T-Mobile G1 – and other devices from Apple and Open Handset Alliance – largely will be fought in the cyber-trenches of Apple’s App Store and the Android Market.

It’s actually a two-front war. The higher-profile front faces consumers, who must see applications attractive enough to convince them to opt for the device. The related and lower-profile battle will be for the hearts, minds and code of the growing ranks of mobile developers who create those applications.

A Happy Day Back Flip

More information is available about the sometimes contentious relationship between developers and Apple, which could be described as being as far from open source as possible. As far as the technology goes, developers – who pay $99 for standard membership or $299 for enterprise membership in the program – virtually all say that they enjoy writing code for the device. This is an Apple product, after all.

All is not sunshine and light, however. The App Store and developers have clashed on a couple of issues, one of which is still a sticking point.

At the outset of the initiative, Apple imposed a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) on information about iPhone code and application programming interfaces (APIs). This, developers say, led to tremendous inefficiencies and a general chilling of creativity. The outcry led Apple in early October to eliminate the NDA for released software. The NDA still exists for elements that are not released in beta, though no Apple representative responded to phone calls or e-mail requests for comment for this story.

Bill Dudney, managing partner of Gala Factory software and a trainer at Pragmatic Studio, said that the abandonment of the NDA enables guides to be written, security tips shared and generally lets iPhone development information flow. "It was a huge happy day back flip," said Dudney of the news that the NDA was gone.

The second sticking point, which has not been addressed, focuses on how Apple is using the right to reject apps that it deems competitive to its own core offerings. That’s potentially a big deal, since the iPhone does a lot of things. Some say that the power to squelch development is not being applied uniformly. Developers also complain that the company is not telling folks that their application was rejected in a timely fashion.

"I think in the long term this is a huge, huge issue," says Harry McCracken, the editor of the Web site Technologizer. "The metaphor I use is that if this was the way Mac operated in the early days, something like Photoshop may never have come along because they could have said it is too close to MacPaint."

Andrew Sokirynsky’s Podcaster application was rejected by Apple. He referred a questioner to his blog, which said that his application was nixed because Apple claimed it duplicates iTunes functionality.

In response to e-mail questions, Sokirynsky said that the rejection came more than a month after Podcaster was submitted. "It could/should have been handled much more quickly and with a lot more communications," Sokirynsky wrote. "If the app got flagged, then tell me we need more time to review the app. They left me in the dark."

Sokirynsky wouldn’t comment on whether he feels Apple had solid grounds for the rejection. His objections are more focused on the process. Robert Palmer, a blogger for the Unofficial Apple Weblog, says that there is some grumbling in the developer community over the approval process. One idea, he says, is for developers to submit a functional spec that can be provisionally approved or disallowed by Apple. The problem from the Apple side, he says, is that such a process would effectively double the assessments the company has to do.

In general, however, Apple seems to be being judicious. According to www.boredzo.org, 11 applications have been given the heave-ho by Apple.

Less Known About Android

The Android Market initially offered apps for free at launch on October 22, in conjunction with the release of the T-Mobile G1 phone. Further details are sketchy, though. "It’s at such an early stage that we don’t know almost as much as we do know," McCracken said. "The big question with Android and the developers is to what degree it is an open platform."

There already has been at least one imbroglio with developers. In June, an e-mail snafu tipped off the community that finalists in the Android Developer Challenge were given an updated version of the Android software developers kit (SDK) before others. That situation, which would raise eyebrows under any circumstance, was accentuated by the almost universal description of the earlier SDK as "buggy" by developers.

Josh Guilfoyle, who is developing an Android application called Five that will automatically sync home music collections with devices, was disappointed by the situation. "It made you step back and say, 'What the hell is going on?' It doesn’t remind me of any open community I ever developed on," Guilfoyle says.

He remains optimistic about the Android Market, however. "I think doing a proper marketplace or app store is not that hard. You allow any developer to contribute the app, set up a price or not and let the community take its course. It’s a hard thing to screw up. I am optimistic that it will work out."

There always will be ways to distribute applications. This will be less of an issue for open source-based applications, which can be distributed through marketplaces such as Handango, which recently said it is setting up an Android channel on its eight-year-old marketplace. Alex Bloom, the vice president of content and international for the site, said he hopes some day to open an iPhone channel.

At the end of the day, the emergence of Android, the iPhone and other smartphones is good news. The elimination of the Apple NDA may lead to competition between leading platforms over developers, who will have a choice of platforms – and philosophies.

"Desktop and Web development people with tremendous creativity … will do extremely novel applications on mobile," said Joe Pezzillo, the founder of Metafly, a company that writes applications for financial services companies. "There are many other innovative companies out there, but the scales of Apple and Google suggest market opportunity."