Well, it finally happened. After releasing a dozen or so different devices, the Android platform has finally overtaken Apple, according to a recent NPD North American pole.

Apple is reportedly brushing it off as an inaccurate sampling limited to one market, but it's likely an indication that Android is finally starting to get traction in the market, and that's not necessarily a bad thing for Jobs and company.

Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while probably know where I'm going with this, but I'll spell it out anyways.

You see, Apple has as of late caught the eye of anti-trust regulators. The recent decision to limit development to Apple-approved platforms caused a stir and brought in the authorities to take a close look at Apple.

And the development issue is only the tip of Apple's "my way or the highway" iceberg. There's of course the App Store, which limits the user to Apple's own retail service. Then there's the fact that Apple updates have a tendency to disable phones that remove those protections.

After that there's the strict and occasionally inconsistent rules regulating what applications get admitted to the App store.

Basically, if it can be proven that Apple is using its weight in the industry to bully developers and users away from the competition, the whole outfit is just one huge anti-trust case waiting to happen.

If Apple can prove that it's not the big force in the market, however, those worries go away. The company has for decades kept strict protections on the Mac that Microsoft would never get away with because of its market share.

In other words, if Apple wants to keep being Apple it had better hope that Android continues to grow and prove that Steve Jobs doesn't control the smartphone world.

12 May 2010