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How Apple's App Review Is Sabotaging the iPhone
snydeq writes to recommend Peter Wayner's inside look at the frustration iPhone developers face from Apple when attempting to distribute their apps through the iPhone App Store. Wayner's long piece is an extended analogy comparing Apple to the worst of Soviet-era bureaucracy. "Determined simply to dump an HTML version of his book into UIWebView and offer two versions through the App Store, Wayner endures four months of inexplicable silences, mixed messages, and almost whimsical rejections from Apple — the kind of frustration and uncertainty Wayner believes is fast transforming Apple's regulated marketplace into a hotbed of bottom-feeding mediocrity. 'Developers are afraid to risk serious development time on the platform as long as anonymous gatekeepers are able to delay projects by weeks and months with some seemingly random flick of a finger,' Wayner writes of his experience. 'It's one thing to delay a homebrew project like mine, but it's another thing to shut down a team of developers burning real cash. Apple should be worried when real programmers shrug off the rejections by saying, "It's just a hobby."'"
Apple's managed to get more than fifty thousand apps through the process and onto the store. Nobody's going to write stories about the ones that went smoothly.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Might have been 2 billion if it was an easier process.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Sidekicks -- They have a "marketplace too". Locked down. T-mobile phones. Locked down. AT&T phones. Locked down. Almost every phone in existance has a "market place" equivalent, which has an approval process. Suddenly the iPhone comes along and people were expecting sunshine and kittens?
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I unlocked my phone within minutes of getting it home. I then proceded to take a look at the apps available via the Cydia store, which is unencumbered by the Apple review process.
Pretty much everything I tried was garbage with the developers doing just enough to get something ported and then abandoning it regardless of what kind of glaring bugs are in the system, yes the reveiw process is harsh but it does help maintain a minimum level of quality that is bettter than 99% of the apps in the cydia store.
(still, being able to get low level access to my phone still makes the jailbreak worthwhile)
Why would I as a developer put time and hard effort into developing software if I believed there was a good chance it would never even get the chance to be installed?
If the results of the review process resulted in less junk cluttering up the appstore than the delays would be more acceptable, but the things they allow are just bizzare. Do they really need almost 400 separate 'supafan' apps from the same developer where the only difference is which celebrity news is being tracked?
air and light and time and space
Can't you just post a link to a bug tracker in your product description?
You may recall this story about how Apple thrives under Steve Jobs dictatorial and secretive management style.
You may even recall the infamous slashdot iPod launch coverage in which it was deemed "lame" because it was less feature-rich than the competition.
This is the history of Apple: there is a market for simple, well-managed products that work out of the box, and maintaining tight proprietary control over the Apple universe is how this is accomplished. I don't know what this says for openness, but there you have it. So long as your use cases aren't too far out of the ordinary, I guess it's worth it to have the trains run on time.
Apple's customers are not the app developers. Apple's customers are the iPhone users. So long as there are users waiting in line with money to spend, there will be app developers competing for that money, no matter how arduous the review process may be.
This will only change when a competitor such as Android offers better apps or better selection than what the Apple store carries. This could happen, but it will take quite some time due to Apple's head start.
It's a fucking Ebook. Why the hell do you need javascript?
From what others have been pointing out you've been trying to do something naughty or odd and you're getting called out on it. You just won't admit that you're at fault and would rather just take the shot at Apple.
I certainly rather enjoy that you make note to call out Apple for their vague reasons for denying your application, but yet you have not been very open exactly as to what has been rejected. You could very well post the source code to your application if you were this desperate to call Apple out, but you won't, because chances are someone, somewhere, will call bullshit on you. The fact is, that Apple is vague because they might not have all of the source available--but you do. And you are the only one that can change what you're doing, not them.