When Apple brought out iPhone OS 3.0 they broke all applications that relied on direct access to the camera stream or to camera controls for no obvious reason. 100.000′s of buyers of such tools lost their money and developers weren’t accepted again as the loss of such great apps like CameraPro, NightCam (ex steady shot) and co showed.

Now the game starts over. Two new apps that use “forbidden” features of the iPhone got approved by Apple: RealCam SE and some chinese bar code scanning application. The official developer forums had threads asking what made those apps different but of course Apple denied informations on that topic. But that was to be expected since there’s virtually no customer support from Apple.

In any case, this gonna bring Apple good money. They destroy a generation of a certain app type, then allow in new products that do exactly the same things – so they can sell the same idea over and over. Guess you could call that a business model. A quite evil one.

Such behavious really makes you wonder why people think that Apple is the slightest bit better then MS when it comes to dirty business practices.