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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."'"
Well I do have an iPhone, and there are a lot of good apps there. Certainly more good stuff than any other phone platform.
As to the proportion that is good... if Apple didn't filter out various of the worst UI disasters as they do, the proportion of crap would be higher.
As to the summary author... he dumped his book into a webview, and then Apple wouldn't publish it. Case in point. They've published plenty of ebooks with good UIs.
That's your phone provider's fault. I've got an iPhone and I love it. I have wasted so much time with it. Trism, Peggle (great control!), and Flight Control have taken large chunks of my life.
Both my siblings have Palm Pres. I've played with them, and they're quite nice. My only complains were the build quality (would like it a little tighter) and navigation (you have to know the gestures, they're not discoverable). The card metaphor is very good.
But the app store is empty. There are three games, one of which is... connect 4.
The SDK was just released to the public, in beta. It's not meant for games, it's barely more advanced than the first way to develop for the iPhone (which was so roundly criticized). You can't get accelerometer data faster than 4 samples/sec. Palm is supposed to be making a gaming framework, but who knows how long that will be.
So right now Palm is taking submissions for their app store, which will only be able to handle non-demanding games (no Katamari Damacy there), for it's fall opening. Even if your game is done, no one will be able to buy it for months.
Basically, the Pre will be devoid of good apps for at least the next 6 months. The situation is really sad. They messed it up, big time. The SDK, even in alpha, should have been available months ago, so there would be apps at launch.
Windows Mobile has tons of apps, and a tradition of tiny little utilities costing $20. Combine that with the fragmentation of device capabilities and the market is... rough for a consumer.
Blackberries? I've heard that to develop anything on them that doesn't look like a 1996 Java applet requires you to basically do the painting for every widget on screen. There is device fragmentation here too. The app store it's self is a joke, it's very difficult to use. There is no way to browse it from a computer, which makes using it a nightmare.
Apple proved good apps were a "killer app". No one really "got" the importance of them before the iPhone's native SDK came out. Unfortunately, after more than a year, no one else is even close to being able to foster any kind of app ecosystem. Palm should have, but botched it.
I'm not really sure about the G1. I'm guessing it's sales are just too small for it to reach any kind of critical mass soon (where the Pre has a chance and Blackberries are there).
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
> If the iPhone were properly designed it shouldn't be possible to brick via just a software installation
I'd say the exact opposite is true. Who wants a platform that is so locked down you can't screw it up hacking it? Boooorring! It's precisely because you can brick it that Pwnage tool can exist, and I'd say the platform would be FAR less interesting if that were the case.
Wow, such an anti-technology skew. So out of place on /.
Don't get me wrong, the whole approval thing seems like something out of the dark ages to me. But seriously, the machine shouldn't be hackable? Yikes!
Maury
Amen to all of the things you said. I'm struggling right now with the capricious nature of the review process. My app is a gesture based music player with larger fonts, designed to make using your iPhone/touch in the car much safer. It was approved at the OS 3.0 launch, but a few bugs cropped up at the last second. I submitted a bug fix three days later, but it *still* hasn't been posted. Last week Apple rejected the update claiming it duplicates the functionality of the iPod app without sufficient differentiation. Really? Then how come you didn't pull the app completely (instead of just blocking the update)? And since when has the iPod music player offered gesture based navigation to change songs, etc? And why'd you approve it in the first place? Give me a break. I love Apple, but this has GOT to change. I keep hoping it's just because they're overloaded, but let's hire more people already!
Shameless plug:
FlickTunes (website)
FlickTunes (iTunes)
The rich get richer. Browsing the App Store, you see the most popular apps at the top. There is no power search for apps with the highest user ratings. I really can't find what I'm looking for.
New app developers start at the bottom and have to compete against popular apps already ingrained at the top.
I'm writing for an App Review site right now that hopes to help alleviate that.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Not a single version of the Apps I submitted had the ability to change themselves or allow me to change them remotely. None. Nada.
If they really are doing more than checking for forbidden strings, they would be able to see that quickly by skimming the HTML. It's very boring. Plus, it's easier to read. It's not in binary like many apps.
I don't see how an "external framework"-- the term they used-- has anything to do with this. The rejection note said that I was to make sure that everything was to be "interpreted and run by Apple's Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s)". It's always been that way from the start. It doesn't matter who writes the code.
The only way I can interpret (hah!) what you're saying is to conclude that App development is meant to be like elementary school. You're not supposed to work with others. You're not allowed to use well-tested open source code. You're supposed to write your own code. Why is this wrong? Why is working with others going to give me the magical ability to change how my app works remotely?
Ultimately, it doesn't really matter why Apple rejected my application because many others come away with exactly the same experience even if they don't use PhoneGap: it's all pretty much random. Sometimes you get a cogent rejection note. Sometimes you don't. Sometimes they're fair. Sometimes they're not. It's all a coin flip which is the main point of my piece. It's not about PhoneGap. It's about the randomness and the brick wall and the lack of communication and the absolute power etc.
Your point is taken. However, it's a false dichotomy.
I have an Openmoko Neo Freerunner. It's thoroughly hackable in all respects, except (for legal reasons) the GSM and GPS firmware. Pretty much the opposite of "locked down". Yet it's not possible for me to screw it up completely; there's a backup copy of the bootloader, which cannot be overwritten by any software running on the phone. No matter how badly the OS gets broken, I can always use that backup bootloader to re-flash and start over.
Even this doesn't qualify as "locking down", however; if I really wanted to, I could buy a "debug board" from OM which would allow me to overwrite everything, including the bootloader. The debug board, naturally, would allow me to brick the phone much more thoroughly, but at the same time it would also enable me to undo any changes I made.
Even without the debug board, I think the Neo qualifies as both sufficiently hackable and sufficiently unbrickable for most purposes.