That's the main reason, my friends, that successful mobile startup is a huge oxymoron right now.<p>I work for one of the biggest mobile app vendors, and to get to that stage, you have to be in bed with the carriers, yet if you made too much money, they probably will aim squarly at you, and do in house (or with third parties) what you used to do.<p>They can just look out whatever they don't like. Even if they tell the user they are paying for "data service", they still let in only non-free apps where they get half the cut so the consumer is being charged twice for that data access.
They can ban apps outright, or just make it in a way that everytime the app request something on the network, and anoying popup comes to tell the user if they want to give this app permission to access the network.
Here is the dirty trick: They put up this poup for every HTTP request, which means any network aware application becomes useless! It used to be that many phones that the option to let the user say "Yes", once, and never be bothered anymore, but carriers just requested phone manufactors to remove this, and annoy the users everytime, unless the app is "blessed" (i.e. signed) by the carrier themselves.<p>Of course they are doing this to "protect the user", and their "network", which is total b.s.<p>Unfortunately, the FCC does nothing about this, and that's why Google's move to force open apps standard with all the spectrum auctioning that happened a couple of months ago, was a great step.<p>The scary part is that this is yet another look, on how the internet could become if ISPs or broandband providers are let to tamper with whatever they want and all the traffic that passes thru them. That's why I think net neutrality is a very important issue, and it should be extended to wireless providers also.