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A Story of Why Devs Should Think Twice about Developing for the iPhone

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Re: A Story of Why Devs Should Think Twice about Developing for the iPhone

#11

Post by zyb09 »

lacker wrote: post #4

Maybe you should just not put other companies' copyrighted game names in your keywords. It sounds like Apple is purposefully slowing you down because they consider you to be malicious.

What an evil devil you are putting the name of one mini-game of a mini-game collection, that shipped as a bonus to an accessory, in YOUR keywords - thereby harvesting all the hard labor done by Nintendo. Outrage! You absolutely deserve to be punished by Apple (which is obviously just doing the job your parents should have done a long time ago!)

Re: A Story of Why Devs Should Think Twice about Developing for the iPhone

#12

Post by ruslan »

brianobush wrote: post #5

and to add on to the dev hurdle, you must code in obj-c and have a mac. I am sure there are ways around the mac part, but limiting the target language already discourages many devs from building apps for the iphone. i myself am slowly becoming an android fan (ASE - http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/wiki/FAQ )

Ain't Android limiting you to Java only, while for iPhone you can develop in any language which can be compliled into ARM ELF object file and linked by ld ? Beside the UI part of course.

I hate developing for iPhone too cause Obj-C is not a language, it is a piece of messy crap! It makes code look like spaghetti. I receive a great pleasure developing for Android, yet Java is far from the language of my choice though it's far better than Obj-C.

PS. What disappoints me about Android is that a simple "hello world" app consumes at least 12MB of RAM because of a running copy of Java/Dalvik VM. Google has to do something about it.

Re: A Story of Why Devs Should Think Twice about Developing for the iPhone

#13

Post by enntwo »

zyb09 wrote: post #11
lacker wrote: post #4

Maybe you should just not put other companies' copyrighted game names in your keywords. It sounds like Apple is purposefully slowing you down because they consider you to be malicious.

What an evil devil you are putting the name of one mini-game of a mini-game collection, that shipped as a bonus to an accessory, in YOUR keywords - thereby harvesting all the hard labor done by Nintendo. Outrage! You absolutely deserve to be punished by Apple (which is obviously just doing the job your parents should have done a long time ago!)

I assume lacker's point is in reference to the use of the word "Wii" itself, which is clearly a Nintendo trademark. It is not unreasonable that Apple does not want to have an app using a recognizable trademark of another company. And if you read the article, you notice that the reason they were rejected for using Wii, is because Apple felt that it was unrelated to the app, and was used as a keyword to drive search results. (Which was not the case, but from just looking at the keywords is a reasonable response).

The issue the article brings up with Apple is the overall process of such a small issue resulting in an overall 40+ day delay of release due to a poor reviewal process. The article was must less critial of the actual banning of the term "Wii".

Re: A Story of Why Devs Should Think Twice about Developing for the iPhone

#14

Post by steveklabnik »

ellyagg wrote: post #9
stcredzero wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even though the binary submission was not altered, we were forced to re-upload the binary and wait an additional >2 weeks for the next round of review feedback for removing ONE sentence from the description. This smacks of the sort of bureaucratic mediocrity which Steve Jobs should hate and have hunted down, quickly and without mercy. It's exactly the sort of big company rot that slows a big company down.

Unfortunately, like google, apple has never been big on customer service, of which this is a sort.

Really? Never been big on customer service?

Every time that I (or anyone else that I know) has ever had a problem with an Apple product, they've taken swift care of the issue. They've given me a brand new iPod on the spot when an old one broke before. Apple's customer service is one of the main reasons that people buy Apple products.

Not that the app queue doesn't suck, don't get me wrong.

Re: A Story of Why Devs Should Think Twice about Developing for the iPhone

#16

Post by credo »

lacker wrote: post #4

Maybe you should just not put other companies' copyrighted game names in your keywords. It sounds like Apple is purposefully slowing you down because they consider you to be malicious.

It looks like Apple did the right thing here. They stopped the app from using a term copyrighted by Nintendo. They also communicated the rejection reason to the developer clearly.

Ultimately, this is probably going to be a win-win for both sides. Apple does the right thing. The app description and keywords don't mislead users (and as a result of the blog post complaining about Apple, the app also gets a lot of free publicity)

Re: A Story of Why Devs Should Think Twice about Developing for the iPhone

#17

Post by NathanKP »

From the article:

Sure Apple has its reasons, namely pushing its 85k or 100k or 250k apps commercials to prove it has the most evolved app ecosystem versus its peers. But if Apple doesn’t fix these problems soon, those numbers will begin to mean less and less, and at some point the number of apps in the App store will be about as meaningful as the number of videos uploaded to YouTube.

That doesn't really make sense to me. Apple has strict quality control for the exact reason that they don't want their store to turn into YouTube. Turning down apps is how they maintain quality.

Re: A Story of Why Devs Should Think Twice about Developing for the iPhone

#18

Post by tici_88 »

lacker wrote: post #4

Maybe you should just not put other companies' copyrighted game names in your keywords. It sounds like Apple is purposefully slowing you down because they consider you to be malicious.

Contrary to popular opinion, using copyrighted terms is not against the law. For example, you shouldn't feel threatened that the black helicopters are going to swarm overhead if you are using copyrighted words like Apple, iPhone, Wii etc. in ordinary conversations.

Using copyrighted terms is questionable for products if those terms (a) are in the same category as the copyrighted term (in the case of Wii, I am assuming a gaming device) and (b) are likely to cause consumer confusion.

In this case, the legal question that a jury would be asked is "Would a reasonable user confuse the 'wii tank' iphone app with the Wii gaming console"?

Not sure what the answer in reality would be actually - just giving anothe perspective. And I haven't even seen their app. And yes, Wii is a popular term and popular trademarks like Coca Cola are granted more weight under the law, so who knows.

But shouldn't legal matters be left to the courts of the land and not become the jurisdiction of the app store approval process?

Re: A Story of Why Devs Should Think Twice about Developing for the iPhone

#19

Post by zyb09 »

enntwo wrote: post #13
zyb09 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What an evil devil you are putting the name of one mini-game of a mini-game collection, that shipped as a bonus to an accessory, in YOUR keywords - thereby harvesting all the hard labor done by Nintendo. Outrage! You absolutely deserve to be punished by Apple (which is obviously just doing the job your parents should have done a long time ago!)

I assume lacker's point is in reference to the use of the word "Wii" itself, which is clearly a Nintendo trademark. It is not unreasonable that Apple does not want to have an app using a recognizable trademark of another company. And if you read the article, you notice that the reason they were rejected for using Wii, is because Apple felt that it was unrelated to the app, and was used as a keyword to drive search re…

yeah but what's the big deal.. why don't they just relax and let people use "wii" as tag. If nintendo gets angry (which might never happen to begin with) just do a quick DELETE FROM Keyword WHERE tag='wii'. Problem solved. If they would please stop being so picky about everything. There wouldn't be so much complains about the approval process, if people were thinking its fair what Apple is doing.

Re: A Story of Why Devs Should Think Twice about Developing for the iPhone

#20

Post by blasdel »

steveklabnik wrote: post #14
ellyagg wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, like google, apple has never been big on customer service, of which this is a sort.

Really? Never been big on customer service? Every time that I (or anyone else that I know) has ever had a problem with an Apple product, they've taken swift care of the issue. They've given me a brand new iPod on the spot when an old one broke before. Apple's customer service is one of the main reasons that people buy Apple products. Not that the app queue doesn't suck, don't get me wrong.

For consumers sure, but for bigger players their customer service is as bad as Google's.

The App Store's unfriendliness is not new -- it's just the awful iTMS experience with a larger audience. Institutional hardware customers have been getting fucked on a regular basis ever since the return of Jobs.

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