5 Things Apple Must Do to Look Less Evil

For a company that made its name fighting for the little guy, it's a surprising reversal. In the past, Apple touted itself as the computer company for nonconformists who “Think Different." Now the company is making moves that make it look like the Big Brother it once mocked.

First Apple tightened its iron grip on the already-stringent iPhone developer policy, requiring apps to be made with Apple-approved languages, which disturbed some coders and even children. A short while later, Apple rejected some high-profile apps based on their editorial content, raising journalists' questions about press freedoms in the App Store. Then, police kicked down a Gizmodo editor's door to investigate a lost iPhone prototype that Apple had reported as stolen. Even Ellen DeGeneres and Jon Stewart have mocked Apple's heavy-handed moves.

Plenty of us love our shiny iPads, iPods, iPhones and MacBooks -- state-of-the-art gadgets with undeniable allure. But it's tough to imagine customers will stay loyal to a company whose image and actions are increasingly nefarious. We want to like the corporation we give money to, don't we?

Here are five things Apple should do to redeem its fast-fading public image.

Publish App Store Rules
As I've argued before, the App Store's biggest problem is not that there are rules, but that app creators don't know what the rules are. As a result, people eager to participate in the App Store censor themselves, and that hurts innovation and encourages conformity. The least Apple can do is publish a list of guidelines about what types of content are allowed in the App Store. After all, Apple has had nearly two years and almost 200,000 apps to figure out what it wants in the App Store. Tell people what the rules are so they know what they're getting into, and so they can innovate as much as possible. That would also tell us customers what we're not getting on our iPhone OS devices.

Formalize Relationships With Publishers
Publishers are hypnotized by imaginary dollar signs when they look at the iPad as a platform that could reinvent publishing and reverse declining revenues. But after recent editorial-related app rejections, journalists are slowly waking up to our forewarning that Apple could control the press because news and magazine apps on the iPad are at the mercy of the notoriously temperamental App Store reviewers. If Apple wants to look a little less like the Chinese government, it should work with publishers to ink formal agreements regarding content to guarantee editorial freedom to respected brands.