Developers Unhappy With iPhone
Marco Arment from Tumblr shares his experience with Apple:
Apple thinks reviews can take 8-30 days and web-capable apps need nudity warnings and the management interface can be buggy as shit and they don’t need us to be able to reach them and nobody really needs to take any of this very seriously.
Because it’s working for them. They’re making a killing taking their 30% commission on the 1.5 billion copies of $0.99 top-25 games that they’ve sold. Who cares if the App Store discourages good developers from putting serious effort into it? Apple doesn’t need to care. And, clearly, they don’t.
I don’t know if it’s possible to get past that.
Emphasis in the original. Marco goes on to detail how Apple reps refused to answer or cooperate with the developer community:
Three parties are involved: the developers (us), Apple, and the customers. For the most part, Apple stands between us and our customers, so the interaction there is limited: we can’t issue refunds, we can only issue a few promo copies, we can’t collect upgrade revenue, we can’t respond to App Store reviews, we can’t provide installation support, and we can’t release updates to address customers’ issues in a reasonable amount of time. We can’t even tell them when the next update will be available, because we honestly don’t know. It might be 6 days. It also might be 2 months. It also might never happen because Apple may refuse any further updates to our app. Our customers, like us, are mostly in the dark with this process, and we can’t do much to help them.
For the most part, it’s just us and Apple in the room.
And Apple’s a brick wall. …
But for iPhone developers, Apple holds all of the power in the relationship. Apple could decide tomorrow to pull Instapaper from the App Store, refuse all future updates, and remotely delete it from every customer’s iPhone without notice or reason. Or, more realistically, they could sit on my 2.0 update for two weeks or more before rejecting it for an issue they could have mentioned in either of its two previous rejections. (Currently still waiting: it’s now day 14 since my most recent submission, and I have no idea when — or whether — it will be approved.)
Emphasis in the original. I haven’t done any iPhone development, but the article is quite enlightening. Particularly in concert with Amazon’s yanking of books from Kindle, this makes the DRM argument (and why it’s such a bad thing) even more vivid for the consumer.
– Update —
Mark Bernstein chimes in as well:
- The dominant platform offers thousands of choices, but only when authorized through a single source.
- The dominant price point is so low that the penalty for selling garbage is slight.
- Authorization is always slow and often capricious.
- The age-rating system is obviously doomed, since noisy groups assert that almost every aspect of existence is unsuitable for children.
- The result is that most applications are barely-functional junk, and star applications are often little more than slight papering-over of the built-in APIs or of familiar genres.
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