Bye-bye iPhone. It's Been Swell.

When I first started hearing rumors that Apple would come out with its own cell phone -- more than a year before it was actually available in Canada, it turned out -- I stopped looking at new cellphone hardware. I stopped being excited about flips and bricks, bluetooth and earbuds. I stopped searching through Sonys, Nokia, Motorola, LGs, Blackberries. I gave them all raspberries.

I stopped thinking about changing my cellphone plan with my provider, to add this long-distance, or that voicemail gizzy-do, because every time I did, they would lump on a "3 year contract required" clause, which would make it harder for me to change companies, which I may have had to do if the iPhone wasn't available with them (eventually, it was).

And when the iPhone was finally put out there by Fido, my provider, I snapped it up -- first spending 7 hours in line on opening day, to discover that I still had 14 months left on my contract, and they weren't making it available to customers like me who had more than 8 months (or some arbitrary number like that) left on a contract.

But now I'm done. Well, almost done. I'll keep my iPhone for now; but my next hardware switch will be to an Android phone.

I'm not walking away from the most anticipated consumer product I've ever purchased because I'm bored with it. I'm very far from being bored with it: I recently got (some say, over-) excited about the monitoring of my sleep cycle -- through the innovative app "Sleep Cycle" -- which lets me know if I got a bad 7 hours of shut-eye, so I can minimize the unexpected cranky that somehow got under my collar, which I probably otherwise wouldn't even notice. My iPhone makes me think about getting proper sleep; it has me backing away from bright-light screens an hour before bedtime, pulling up a book, turning off music -- those things "good sleep" gurus tell us is important. To get good sleep. Because of a cellphone. Because of the iPhone.

I'm not walking away from something which has changed my sleep, keeps me on calendar, tracks my daily tasks and calendar, because I don't need it -- and this is beside the fact that it makes and receives phone calls.

I'm walking away because of a very simple, important principle. And that principle is girls in bikinis.

Well, not exactly girls in bikinis. You've probably heard that Apple has this past weekend banned from its Applications store those Apps which do nothing else but display girls in bikinis. Now, anyone who has a cable modem can tell you that access to images of girls in bikinis is not hard to come by, and banning something which provides them is a bit like banning wind.

No, the problem is that Apple has decided that it's not a platform, it's a channel.

"What?"

I said, the Apple iPhone is not a platform, it's a channel. A platform provides a protocol -- software and hardware capabilities, which others -- note OTHERS -- can make use of as they will. The importance of a platform is that it becomes limited only by other's imaginations -- that is, by the collective imagination of people who would like to make a living, buy a boat, send their kids to Harvard based on profits made by selling you uses of that platform. Which is why I was happy to shell out 99 cents for "Sleep Cycle", which lets me sleep better and feel better during the day, while sending its author's kids to Harvard (well, at 99 cents, maybe UCLA).

A channel is just a mode to deliver content determined by the owner of that channel. And this weekend, Apple decided that it wants to be a channel, not a platform, and it announced that rather strongly by banning some -- but not all -- applications which show girls in bikinis. This is because, it appears, Apple believes that its core consumers for the iPad -- which will use the same App store as the iPhone when it comes out in May or so -- will be families, and it apparently also believes that families do not want to see girls in bikinis, does not want to see them so very much, that they won't buy Apple Applications of any type if there are Apps of girls in bikinis around. Such is the danger they pose.

Now, don't get Apple wrong. Even though they banned apps designed to show girls in bikinis, they are not against apps which show girls in bikinis. You see, as the New York Times pointed out, they permit Sports Illustrated's swimsuit app, which has identical content to those apps Apple banned to make their store family safe. Why? Philip W. Schiller, head of worldwide product marketing at Apple, said “The difference is this is a well-known company with previously published material available broadly in a well-accepted format,” he said. So there you have it! Families are safe if the bikinis come from a well-known company with previously published material available blah blah blah. But not the other thing. Other thing, bad, according to Apple.

But what if Apple changes their minds, and next week suddenly lets bikinis galore back onto the phone? Flooding the color screen with jiggly so giggly that even the most iridescent college freshman feels fresh? Will I re-warm to the iPhone then?

Doesn't matter -- doesn't matter in the least, because once you decide you have the power to open and close the gates, you are then and thereafter, forever after, a gatekeeper. You can open those gates wide, let the people flood through, but there you are standing next to them, ready to shut them tight if you should decide that some burly, surly types are not to your liking.

I don't like gatekeepers. I was 12 once. But I'm not anymore, and now that I'm an autonomous adult, I expect the world to be my oyster. I expect that, if I should want bikinis on my iPhone (or bikinis on women on my iPhone -- whatever) that it's there.
What's more, I want a computing device where anyone -- absolutely anyone -- can develop software for it, and don't have to receive permission from the self-appointed gatekeepers, who just happened to make the hardware. I don't want to hear that the makers of the phone shut out software developer X because they wrote an app which competes with core capability Y, or that Z can't distribute their software because vertical-agreement service vendor A thinks it infringes on their secret agreement with Apple.

That takes too much effort on my part.

I want to know that the best authors are writing software for the platform I own, and they will only do that if they know that, after they develop the application, nobody will tell them they can't sell it.

And that's what Android promises: an open source, open environment in its online app store, the Android Marketplace.

So, goodbye Apple iPhone. It's been swell.