Because lawyers. Apple currently is under no obligation to release the rational for their decision. If they publicly tell him why, he can challenge it much more effectively. The apple NDA is possibly too broad to be enforceable and given that ALL of their competitors are allowed access to the developer system, gives them no traditional protection of trade secrets. Id est, It gives them an unintended benefit of controlling the public story (and thus some degree of market forces) about their products, but does not keep their market competition from peaking inside. If they divulge the rationale, and he challenges it in court it would upend their (and lots of other) developer programs, or at the very least cost them lots of time, attention and goodwill fighting to preserve it.

In order to challenge the decision to revoke his developer account in court, he would have to show that Apple has a legal obligation to provide and maintain such accounts. I suspect that Apple has no such obligation, and therefore a fear of lawsuits would not be a reason for them to conceal the reason for his account revocation.

The distinction between hardware and software is blurring. Software-defined-X is becoming a thing.

Apple/Google/Microsoft thinking is easier to understand if the black slab in your hand is considered one thing, not two things. If it is not a general purpose personal computing device (PC), but a branded PDA that makes calls.

For most consumers, that’s right, and for them, the strategy is right. Make the PDA experience seamless and safe.

>Personally I hate this new move towards Apple/Microsoft/Google being gatekeepers for everything that can run on a machine. It's fucking bullshit.

It's what people want. The population is happily giving these companies all this power, and refuses to abandon them or pressure them in any way when they do this stuff.

And to be fair, I don't see Google acting nearly this badly. If anything, they're the opposite: they don't exercise enough control over their app store, so it has a lot of spyware and malware. As for MS, they seem to be incompetent and powerless: they tried to make an app store for Windows 10 and that was a big flop, and of course they tried to ape Apple/Google with Windows Phone, and that was a big flop too.