In many areas that Internet has been quite successful in disintermediating users and producers of content. But one area still filled with intermediaries, acting as gatekeepers, is the mobile phone application market. For whatever reason mobile phones have ended up being treated like the closed platforms that games consoles typically are, rather than like the open platforms that desktop computers usually are. Even when both platforms are being produced by the same companies.

Apple has come in for quite a bit of criticism for their role as a gatekeeper, to the point that various prominent developers to stop developing for the iPhone. This has led to various people trying to guess what will lead to an application being rejected.

One of the casualties of this gatekeeper control is a port of KeePass to the iPhone. KeePass is a password database which has versions available for many platforms, including Linux and the Mac. This would be great, since I've been looking for a cross platform password database to replace Keyring for PalmOS and JPilot (with its Keyring plugin). Unfortunately the iPhone app is limited to North America due to USA Crypto Export Restrictions -- it seems that even though these were relaxed several years back, it is still leaves the US State Department and Apple acting as gatekeepers for the export of crypto. (Keyring for PalmOS managed to avoid this by using the DES crypto built into the Palm III (and later) in 3DES mode, thus not shipping specific crypto code but still being reasonable secure -- at the cost of being relatively slow. KeePass is trying to use AES256, which is the current standard crypto algorithm, but seemingly isn't built into the iPhone in a useful way.) (There are also some other issues with KeePass for the iPhone, including the lack of sync other than by uploading it to a random web service. But they are having trouble getting updates past Apple which greatly reduces the chance of any useful updates.)

All of this leads to people jailbreaking devices to get around the gatekeepers, and using external application repositories like Cydia (basically Apt for the iPhone, written by Jay Freeman, aka saurik). Although jailbreaking has its own issues, particularly around updates and reboots (on newer devices the jailbroken devices apparently want to be plugged in via USB at boot). So it'd be nice if the gatekeepers would relinquish a little control, or at least document what is and isn't allowed in detail (something that is apparently done in great detail for the game consoles).

It's less clear how to get around the US crypto export restrictions. Maybe eventually it won't be treated as dangerous munitions, but a way of exporting freedom. (The USA is big on claiming to export freedom, but this mostly seems to be marketing.)