Vote with your dollars. I've put off buying a fancy phone, but seeing the way that apple has treated it's developers and customers I will definitely not be getting an iphone. These days I've been liking more and more the OLD apple. Before ipods and iphones and OSX and brushed aluminum. But I digress. I eagerly await a capable android phone on verizon. Hope they don't screw that one up.
Unfortunately, that won't work as well in this particular case. See, the regular consumer loves the iPhone and has absolutely no idea about the difficulties facing third party developers (it's questionable if they'd care even if they knew). Regardless of what we do, the iPhone will continue to sell like hotcakes.
What we need to do is to fire up a shit storm, and I believe we're seeing the start of that. Keeping my fingers crossed that Apple upper management will: 1) notice it, and 2) take it to heart.
The regular consumer will notice that friends using Pre/Android/something else have cool apps like Google Voice that aren't available on the iPhone, and might buy a different phone come upgrade time.
Of course, there has to be a different phone that's desirable enough, and from what I've heard, that isn't the case yet.
As if Google and Palm wont have their own horrible technological, political and/or ideological problems with their devices. They both have early-stage app-stores too, you know. Google also has a history of no-comment on important issues and closing down / kicking out accounts from their services for unknown reasons, e.g. closing ad-sense accounts without payment.
There are too many parts involved and too little competition that we pretty much have to take bits of any given device and leave other bits alone in order to stay reasonably happy.
You know what the result would be if this noise gets the Google Voice app allowed onto the iPhone? It would be a Google Voice app that I can't use because they don't support GV in the UK. sigh. It's never going to be perfect.
