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Apple did not invent the notion of using cellphones to play games and carry out small tasks, but it certainly made the concept its own . Its app store is the one all developers want to get into, despite the much larger market share claimed by Google’s Android. There are so many competing devices using Android that developers say they have a hard time optimizing their app for that system. Besides, customers are used to spending money for Apple apps, but they tend to want Android apps for free.

All this gives Apple power far beyond its operating system’s 20 percent share of the mobile market. At some point, however, that power might be detrimental for the Internet as a whole.

The big Internet companies — Apple, Amazon, Google — are all pursuing a “walled garden” approach, where they hope to do so much for their customers that they will never leave (Maybe it should be called a “Hotel California” strategy). Internet policy experts did not like walled gardens when America Online built one in the 1990s, and they do not like the prospect of another one triumphing now.

A private universe, they suggest, will ultimately prove a dead-end for innovation — and possibly for tech-sector jobs as well.

“If someone else controls the distribution of your work, and the pricing, then you don’t have a company, you have an affiliate,” said Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library.

If the goal is a diverse and truly free market for all tech entrepreneurs, “you won’t get there from here,” he added. “But if you want it to be a mall, we’re well on the way.”

As with most mall owners, Apple screens out those businesses it judges unworthy or inappropriate. Perhaps it is not surprising that a 2010 app from Tawkon, an Israeli start-up, did not make the grade; it estimated the amount of radiation the iPhone was emitting.

“No interest,” Steve Jobs, Apple chief executive, e-mailed Tawkon, according to the company. An Android version of the app has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times and gets generally good reviews.

“We believe that Steve Jobs didn’t want to associate the iPhone with anything that could have a potential health risk,” a Tawkon cofounder, Gil Friedlander, said in an e-mail. “That said, Tawkon, as our name infers (‘talk-on’), was always a great advocate of mobile phones while empowering users (adults & kids) to use them responsibly.”

Another start-up, Fandor, a subscription service for independent films, had a different sort of problem. Fandor’s app has been downloaded over 100,000 times from Apple. Naturally, it wants to market to these fans directly. But when members subscribe to the service through Apple, it cannot. Apple considers the e-mail addresses its property.

“The more Apple can control, the more it will control,”said Dan Aronson, Fandor’s chief executive. “It’s nice to be king.”

Apple declined to comment on Tawkon or Fandor, but in general has maintained that tight control is essential for ensuring the quality of customers’ experiences. The company screens out potentially buggy or completely ridiculous apps, for example. And Apple says the vast majority of apps — more than 95 percent — are accepted on the first submission.

Mr. Kahle is not reassured. “Apple is creating a feeder system where they get to learn everyone else’s business model and then get to compete with them,” he said. “The lock-down is the biggest issue in the tech industry. There is a difference between the rule of law and the rule of mall police.”