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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."
Same story... "Hi, I'm Mac guy, and I've got nothing to do...because I have no software..."
This is my sig.
Note the irony of a FaceBook employee complainng about Apple's closed system.
They may cite disapproval with Apple's approval process but the reality the app store is getting diluted with more and more apps and developers, and it's getting tougher to make those million dollar apps. Like anything, the first on board have the best chance of benefiting the most fiscally and in popularity. I assume some of these developers are also getting disillusioned that the glory days are gone.
I'm a full time iPhone developer. I'm going no-where.
I find Joe Hewitt's whining to be maddening. He made a very popular iPhone library (the Three20 project) and knowingly used some private API's inside - as far as I can tell without anyone knowing. Then when it turned out Apple started looking to see what symbols your code was using in an extra step to enforce this, Joe basically abandoned the community and decided to quit.
The sad part is that he didn't even need to use them. There are multiple forks of Three20 now that fix the use of the private API's with no loss in functionality.
The other guys, they have more of a reason to be angry although apps rejected continue to be a pretty minor aspect of things, and many rejected apps get through with a few simple changes. But Joe lost any right to complain when he abandoned the people that relied on his expert judgment in the creation of a framework.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Not the trend I have noticed. In the beginning lots of useful apps came out. Lately i have noticed a ton of crappy 99 cent "games" and anything more complex is having a heck of a time getting approved.
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+.