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Respected Developers Begin Fleeing the App Store
wiedzmin writes "Facebook's Joe Hewitt, Second Gear's Justin Williams, the long-time Mac software developer known as 'Rogue Amoeba' and other respected App Store developers have recently decided to discontinue their work on the platform, citing their frustration with Apple's opaque approval process. Continued issues with erroneous and snap rejections of applications and APIs are prompting more and more developers to shun the platform entirely. Though there are tens of thousands of other developers who have pumped out over 100,000 apps for the platform, continued migration away from iPhone development will most likely result in lower quality software."
I beg to differ. Access have a viable solution if you care about your datas: Use access as a front-end to a MsSQL back-end. You have then all the power of Access as a RAD tool with the integrity of a real database.
This is one of the many reasons I bought the 'berry instead. I can purchase whatever apps I want from whomever I want. I bought it, I paid for it, it's MY smartphone, I'll do what I want with it.
Do you have a citation for your Vlingo complaint? Vlingo is available on the iPhone and can dial numbers, search, bring up maps and update social networking status. It can't take dictation, but it seems Vlingo has also stopped selling free dictation on the Blackberry (it now costs $17.99) so it may simply be that they haven't written it for iPhone yet. I wasn't able to find anything about Vlingo getting rejected from the app store. The ability for applications to send e-mail is a fully supported feature in iPhone OS 3.0+.
Could you point it out to the rest of us? Last time I checked, there was no approval process for FB apps, and the FB API requires no NDA. So I'm having a pretty tough time finding any irony here.
Sorry, everyone knows that Apple likes total and complete control
I hear this and I hear people buying into it and it's just a foolish statement. I can develop whatever I want for OSX and that works out just fine. Sure, Apple tends to be a controlling company, but their flagship product is so useful precisely because it isn't overly controlled. Hell, they embraced a UNIX underpinning and let people run X-Windows and Windows/Fusion stuff now. And it's great -- that flexibility is a huge part of what I like about OSX.
The iPhone approval process isn't so bad as to kill things (as this article implies), but it's a disadvantage. Restricting a platform/OS is always a disadvantage. Currently the iPhone has enough other advantages that it doesn't matter, and maybe it'll stay that way. But it's still stupid.
Oh, and the article named three developers (two people and one compnay) so "all" is appropriate and "developers (people) and others (company)" is also appropriate. If you're going to read the sentence carefully, as you said. I agree though that they're trying to make far more out of it than it is.
Cheers.
forgot who it was, but someone blogged that RA was told by Apple that their app was rejected because the iphone API doesn't allow Apple copyrighted content to be used. the Mac API does. instead of fixing it, RA sat on it for months, whined on the blogs and then decided to stop developing for the iphone.
tweetdeck was also rejected at first because they sent an app that crashed all the time.
most of the other sob stories i read about Apple rejecting apps also had a real story where they were told why it was rejected but didn't want to fix it. the C64 emulator games app is a perfect example
This is already possible; Verizon doesn't lock down their Android devices. "Open Application Development" was actually something that Verizon advertised for the Droid. Android's app store isn't restrictive at all (there's even software for rooted phones on there), and if the software you want isn't there, you can download and install it from somewhere else.
Yes! I hope they all flock to Maemo to develop for the awesome Nokia N900 and its children and competitors.
-- Cheers!
No, the GP post is correct. At a previous employer we had a mantra about using Access to store data: it's not a matter of *if* the database is going to corrupt, it's a matter of when. Even moreso in a multi-user environment where the database is being accessed by several client computers. And I'm not talking about typical concurrency problems of user A's data getting overwritten by user B's - we're talking about 'oh shit, the backups better be working' type of corruption.
Personally, I like Objective-C. But even if you don't, its quite possible to do most of the code in C/C++, and I believe there are a few frameworks that try to expose the Objective-C parts in C. Hell, there are several apps written in Mono C#.
Except I'm not really sure if Joe Hewitt counts.
The app isn't leaving the app store. The app is still going to be updated. Facebook owns it. Joe Hewitt threw a hissy fit, and stopped working on it, and Facebook assigned other developers to it, so in practical terms there's nobody actually leaving, just some noise.
At least that's my understanding from reading up on this.
They weren't shipping any Apple icons in their software, they were obtaining the icons through documented API calls and using them in a nonconfusing and reasonable way
They were using images obtained from an API on the Mac desktop - not on the phone.
They then sent those images to the app on the phone.
Would it also have been OK to just download images from Apple.com ? After all, they would not have been stored in the app then...
The whole issue of transference is very grey to me, I can see why they thought it might be OK but can also see why Apple decided in the end they were not.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
No one will tell you what you cannot do?
Um, this is obvious bullshit.
If you design something that interferes with the wrong person's profits, or might mess with the stability of the device, then that app will be disallowed just as surely on the N900 as it would be on any other cellphone, including the iPhone.
Uh, no they can't. The base software on the N900 does come an xterminal program. The N900 is "locked down" (I use that term very loosely) to prevent a casual user from inadvertently screwing up their phone. But for the knowledgeable user, you can gain a root shell on the N900 quite easily. If you have root, well, you own the device.
Maemo is built on top of Debian. You can do 'agt-get install x' from a root shell to install software from any repository yourself. If you screw up your phone well it's you own fault. But one that can easily be corrected. Just reflash it with a base image. Restore all your contacts and restore from a previous Backup, reinstall your apps (the restore will do that for you if you want) and you're good to go. Want OGG support? Install it. Want tethering? (yes it's not setup by default) Just tweak some configuration files. Want OpenSSH? Install it. (That's Openssh Client AND Server mind you).
If Apple's terms say that apps aren't allowed to communicate (which AFAIK they don't; I'm just going on what he said -- 'not allowed'), then how can you be sure that your clever system of URL handling isn't going to be rejected anyways?
How can I be sure? Because it's officially documented as an API on the phone? Because I have shipping apps that use this mechanism already? Because Apple has stated explicitly that custom URL handling is the official mechanism for application IPC?
Pick any one, or all of them because they are valid. It's simply not the case this is "not allowed" or even a grey area. This is well understood and documented.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley