There is a not so subtle battle going on in the iPhone relationship between AT&T and its arguably dominant partner Apple. When Apple announced capability to buy music from iPod  Touch and iPhone, they were very specific in calling the service as “iTunes Wifi Store”.

1. Why would they brand such a generic function after an access technology?
2. Aren’t applications access agnostic? All these need is an IP connection to run over any access link.
3. Following this branding, should they then call their current iTunes store as “iTunes Wireline”?
4. Since most people who access iTunes store from their computers access the Internet through Wifi, isn’t iTunes store, by Apple’s definition a Wifi store?
5. Some of the branding tag lines like, “GetiTunesNow or iTunes on the Go” are taken ( ignore for a moment that these don’t come close to Apple’s standards). Yet, Apple could’ve easily branded the new project in more generic terms than as Wifi Store. Why didn’t they?

It leads one to believe that Apple’s relation with AT&T is strict about what Apple can offer on the “Revolutionary Internet Device”. From AT&T’ side, it announced that it is now offering Pandora music service to its mobile subscribers. It should be noted that Pandora service is not like iTunes in the business model, the former is subscription based and the latter is a music store.

AT&T will charge $9 a month for the Internet music streaming service from Pandora. While the AT&T’s goal is create more users for its data services through services like Pandora, it probably also will get a cut from Pandora. If they had offered iTunes store on iPhone, Apple wouldn’t have offered them any cut from the 99 cents. Apple also won’t support Pandora on their iPhone. The relation between Apple and AT&T clearly is a one up event and not based on future possibilities.
So there is iPhone which can access iTunes Wifi store only through Wifi connection, even though AT&T is the only mobile service provider for iPhone.

There is AT&T’s Pandora offer to non iPhone subscribers.

If these are not the symptoms of a relationship on thin ice, what others would you look for?