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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."
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.
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.
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.
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.