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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."'"

13 of 509 comments (clear)

  1. And yet... by jcr · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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."
    1. Re:And yet... by thisnamestoolong · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yes, but how many of those apps are good? I don't personally have an iPhone but from what I have seen it seems like most iPhone apps are half-baked juvenile distractions, rather than anything seriously useful. It seems logical to me that the overall quality of iPhone apps could be improved tremendously if devs could actually devote time and resources to apps without fear of arbitrary rejection.

      --
      To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
    2. Re:And yet... by syousef · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      Apple is stifling innovation and you think it's fine so long as they've let through 50,000 tetris clones (okay an exaggeration, but it makes my point). Gotta love it. Think different indeed. Think with our marketing blinkers on. To top it off I bet I get modded troll by Apple zealots.

      This is EXACTLY why we need OPEN architectures. No developer should have to go through putting together an application only to have it rejected arbitrarily. The same people who support DRM and copyright supposedly to compensate the creator are happy to deny a developer ANY money for their effort at their whim. Hypocrites!

      Well I won't be buying an iPhone no matter how "cool" they look or what nifty features they have let alone gambling my time and effort developing for one in the hope that some junior Apple cronie rubber stamps it.

      --
      These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
    3. Re:And yet... by peterwayner · · Score: 5, Informative

      Actually they did publish it. Then they took 2+ weeks to publish the dozen or so new lines of code that fixed bugs.

      At the same time they rejected a very similar version. The only difference was some extra HTML. The Cocoa code was equivalent.

      So it was fairly random.

    4. Re:And yet... by wizzat · · Score: 5, Insightful

      How many of them are good? Well, quite honestly alot more are good than if there was no review process at all. If there wasn't a review process, we'd see apps that ignored or borked your settings, leaked memory like a sieve, chewed through your battery life out of ignorance, or hell - maybe we'd simply be looking at a deluge of carbon copy flashlight and porn apps, making the app store effectively useless. Hell, in my opinion (and I do have an iphone) the app store already has *too many* apps, and the quality on the ones there aren't quite high enough for my liking.

      I suppose you could think of it this way: you're looking for a needle (good app that does what you want) and you can either search in the pin cushion full of mostly needles and a bit of straw or you can search through the whole fricking hay stack yourself. I'll take the pin cushion, thank-you-very-much.

      Also, I'm not sure that you're really qualified to say anything about the relative quality of the app store. You don't, afterall, actually have an iphone.

    5. Re:And yet... by peterwayner · · Score: 5, Informative

      From the sound of it he's tried getting the app passed numerous times despite knowing that what he's doing is not allowed.

      Really? What am I doing that's not allowed? I pop up a UIWebView and stick in some HTML. That's it. Yet I got some rejection letters telling me that I was either accessing a private API (I wasn't) or somehow interpreting code. (I wasn't.) The UIWebView was doing that and it is perfectly okay for Apple's frameworks to interpret things.

      Here's what the rejection note said:

      No interpreted code may be downloaded or used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Documented APIs and built-in interpreter(s)."

      Well, everything I do is pumped into the UIWebView which is well documented.

      Furthermore, how can Apple really make any deep decisions like this? I don't upload code. They don't compile it. They look at raw binary code.

    6. Re:And yet... by hedwards · · Score: 5, Insightful

      If the iPhone were properly designed it shouldn't be possible to brick via just a software installation. Childporn is a straw man argument, they've been banning things which could be used to access content that doesn't go with Apple's wholesome image whether or not that was the purpose of the app. As for the description being accurate, there are ways that they could handle that without reviewing it formally chances are the reviewers have different standards than what an individual has..

    7. Re:And yet... by jcr · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Tell-tale strings are a pretty bad way to search for malicious or dangerous applications.

      I'm curious: do you actually expect to get your app approved by arguing about it on /.?

      Write your app with the native API.

      -jcr

      --
      The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
    8. 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.

  2. Have you tried the alternative store? by szyzyg · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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)

    1. Re:Have you tried the alternative store? by MBCook · · Score: 5, Informative

      What percent of the 20+ million devices running iPhone OS do you think are jail broken? It's just not a reliable answer for most people.

      Some people see things how they are.

      --
      Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
  3. Re:And yet... Better Experience by Webcommando · · Score: 5, Informative

    I actually found my experience with the app process much better. Perhaps I got lucky since I'm not a big development house.

    My first application was rejected within a week due to a crash in a certain situation I hadn't caught previously (I should know better than to assume the debug build would act like a release build). Obviously, they go through each of the screens and check the functionality. However, I had expected one of the "nonsensical" reasons I've heard of or the extremely long review process.

    I was surprised that the reviewer put in what the error was and how to reproduce it. I reproduced the error and ultimately resolved. Next submission was accepted after about a week or so as well.

    Based on this experience, I really worked hard to anticipate issues with my next application before submitting. Made it in ten or so days in one pass. Both applications are rather benign without anything controversial which probably played into this.

    I feel fortunate that they made it through relatively easy. I hope the game I'm developing goes as well. The oblig plug -- GMToolKit (RPG helper) and FW Calendar (Calendar with fiscal weeks displayed) are the applications.

    --
    I love the sound of distortion in the morning -- webcommando
  4. Let me try to understand something by Orion+Blastar · · Score: 5, Informative

    is your APP pure HTML, or does it contain JavaScript code like the PhoneGap project uses?

    If it contains JavaScript code, maybe Apple didn't like the way it was designed as it was similar to the old PhoneGap code they rejected, did you update your JavaScript code to the new PhoneGap codebase that was approved, or did you remove the old PhoneGap code with different JavaScript code?

    If your APP is HTML with JavaScript, Apple might have an issue with that. Sometimes JavaScript code can do nonstandard things that locks up a web browser or causes incompatibility issues. When I programmed in JavaScript I had to keep changing my code to changing Web browser standards, as soon as a new web browser was released, the way JavaScript worked would change and I had to change my code to accommodate it.

    If it is pure HTML, there might be tags you are using that Apple finds non-standard and thinks they might run exploited code.

    Here is a story on why Apple rejected the PhoneGap framework in the first place.

    Yeah I know, Apple wants to protect their users and set quality control standards high, and they include such rules as not using third party or open source frameworks, and Apple does not want the APP modified on the iPhone after being bought, Apple does not want the APP to run on a competitor's phone (HTML and JavaScript applications can easily be ported to another format), and PhoneGap type applications may not work on future iPhones, it is all a matter of risk management. Apple does not want to risk anything so it sets strict guidelines on what an iPhone APP can and cannot do.

    Yeah ironically Apple has exchanged freedom for security, and in doing so shut out developers like yourself. Even something as simple as HTML code and/or JavaScript has to be reviewed and has a possibility of being rejected. It goes against the open source philosophy, I don't know what else to say. Even Microsoft is not that strict on what can and cannot be done on their smart phones or Windows OS. Except to say that Microsoft's products are more prone to exploits and viruses and other malware, and maybe Apple is doing this kind of thing to prevent exploits in their iPhone?

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