Developing Software For Tablet Computers
See also: Mobile developmentThe new class of devices heralded by the iPad has spurred the tendency of a walled garden approach, wherein the vendor reserves rights as to what can be installed. The software development kits for these platforms are restricted and the vendor must approve the final application for distribution to users. These restrictions allow the hardware vendor to control the kind of software that can be used and the content that can be seen in the devices; this can be used to reduce the impact of malware on the platform, to provide material of approved content rating, to control the application quality and also to exclude software and content from competing vendors. The walled garden approach to application development has proven to be a competitive advantage for the iPad over HP's TouchPad, triggering HP's withdrawal from the industry, due in large part to sluggish TouchPad sales after only 49 days on the market.
Barnes and Noble adopted the walled garden strategy with its Nook Color and Nook Tablet e-book reader tablets, which FastCompany writer Austin Carr refers to as "an odd idea of progress", since B&N lacks the competitive advantages of number of apps and price enjoyed by Apple and Amazon.com. B&N's strategy became especially notable following pronouncements by B&N executives criticizing Amazon.com's walled garden approach, which they contrasted with B&N's emphasis on user choice. Specifically, in a mid-December interview, B&N CEO William Lynch called Amazon's Kindle Fire a "deficient" media tablet designed as a "vending machine for Amazon's services", and a device aimed to "lock consumers into ecosystem". In contrast, B&N's Nook Tablet gave users choice and a much more "open" experience which, according to Lynch, may be one of the Nook Tablet's most significant selling points. In the same interview, B&N's director of developer relations Claudia Romanini reiterated, "It's about giving choice and range. What we mean in terms of choice, is that we don't lock a customer into a service and say, 'This is the way you're going to get your media.'". Indeed, Nook Tablets shipped until December 2011 were lauded by reviewers and users for permitting users to download and sideload third-party apps, but, one week before Christmas, B&N began pushing an automatic, over-the-air firmware update 1.4.1 to Nook Tablets that removed users' ability to gain root access to the device and the ability to sideload apps from sources other than the official Barnes and Noble app store (without modding).
Proponents of open source software deem that these restrictions on software installation and lack of administrator rights make this category one that, in their view, cannot be properly named "personal computers". Some newer tablet computers using mobile operating systems don't use the walled garden concept, and are like personal computers in this regard.
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