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."'"

Comments

Re:Good

[mjwx]

Not hype. The early adopters of the iPhone bought because they can see something you can't.

Fanboys see many things I cant but to make up for it they cant see many things that are quite obvious to others, like hype.

The value of good design.

Yes, a UI will always overcome poor engineering like overheating issues. The Iphone has no other merits apart from being easy on the eye and that is entirely subjective.

That's because of the innovative design of the zooming and scrolling UI.

Because scrolling and zooming has never been done before. BTW, the iphone is not a ZUI (Zooming User Interface), its a GUI (Graphical User Interface) with a zooming overlay in some applications, like Windows has had since Windows 95. Hardly an innovation.

The later masses have bought into the iPhone because they've seen someone else's being used,

Apple experiences very quick bursts of sales at release time which taper off very quickly, this is consistent with hype based marketing and not with your point.

The iPhone has been the roaring success it has because it's years ahead of any other smartphone.

That's why it took 3 releases to do what WinMo could do for a few years and Android could do from the beginning (video capture, full speed HSDPA and so on). The only part of the iphone that is more advanced then other smartphones is the marketing. But don't let the facts distract you and other fanboys will always be there to buy the iphone.

To deny that just illustrates that you don't really know the market, and probably haven't used an iPhone.

Fanboy logic, argumentum ad logicam. If you disagree with me, you are wrong no matter what the evidence or facts arrayed against me.

For the record, I used the Iphone in October 2007, a scant three months after its release in the states. This is unusual as I'm from Australia. I could have bought a legit Iphone v1 for 35,000 THB in Bangkok (A$1200 at the time), I played with one for a while as I had a 9 hour stopover with time to kill and was completely unimpressed with it. The only differences from HTC and Samsung WinMo at the time phones were superficial. Apple's dictatorial level of control over a device I am supposed to own is a major turn off for me, this is the kind of thing that they hype covers up.