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How Apple's App Review Is Sabotaging the iPhone

Posted by kdawson on from the race-to-the-bottom dept.

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."'"

1 of 509 comments (clear)

  1. Re:And yet... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Who wants a platform that is so locked down you can't screw it up hacking it?

    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.