Apple's Mistake

#1

Post by EliAndrewC » Thu, Nov 19, 2009, 6:29 PM UTC

Re: Apple's Mistake

#2

Post by charlesju » Thu, Nov 19, 2009, 6:56 PM UTC

1. While I agree with most developers that Apple has room for improvement, I think we should take a step back and realize how much of an improvement the iPhone has made mobile developers from a couple of years ago when the carriers were in charge of mobile applications.

2. I think the solution to the iPhone fiasco should be for Apple to hire more reviewers and allow developers to pay more money so that they can buy a faster turnaround time. It doesn't make sense for me to wait 2-3 weeks for another shot at the review process because I placed a bad keyword in the description.

Re: Apple's Mistake

#3

Post by derefr » Thu, Nov 19, 2009, 6:59 PM UTC

The App Store is only viable because Apple is protecting it as a crown jewel loss-leader. If the Store were spun off into a separate company (not a subsidiary) that had to be profitable on its own, I can imagine the policies changing for the better rather quickly.

Re: Apple's Mistake

#4

Post by antirez » Thu, Nov 19, 2009, 7:00 PM UTC

Paul captured my whole feeling about the App Store matter, especially about buying Apple products. Now I feel like I'm doing something wrong. I still like the products but I no longer like the company.

Today my small team of developers submitted the first "toy" we released just to test how the approval process works. Let's see if we'll have some bad experience as well.

Re: Apple's Mistake

#5

Post by b-man » Thu, Nov 19, 2009, 7:01 PM UTC

My vote for a truly free hand-held platform is the n900[1].

It's beautiful, clean and comes with with Debian based distro, Maemo.

My opinions about apple were never positive, probably because I'm only 25 and did not program in the 80's. I've only saw apple as a manufacturer of shiny, well designed rich boy toys, but that is probably because I live in Brazil, where only rich people have it and they think they are 'computer people' because of it.

I was always more influenced by the open source community, and apple's record is far from shiny on that aspect.

My 2 cents.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N900

Re: Apple's Mistake

#6

Post by jgrahamc » Thu, Nov 19, 2009, 7:01 PM UTC

charlesju wrote: post #2

1. While I agree with most developers that Apple has room for improvement, I think we should take a step back and realize how much of an improvement the iPhone has made mobile developers from a couple of years ago when the carriers were in charge of mobile applications. 2. I think the solution to the iPhone fiasco should be for Apple to hire more reviewers and allow developers to pay more money so that they can buy a…

I strongly disagree with your conclusion. Both smack of 'religious' thinking. Your point 1 is essentially 'be thankful to the merciful god who has ended the drought'. Your point 2 doesn't solve the problem, it just throws more priests at it.

The solution is to open the platform to all developers. Imagine if Microsoft had vetted every DOS and Windows app, or if we had to submit Linux apps to Linus for review.

Re: Apple's Mistake

#7

Post by zyb09 » Thu, Nov 19, 2009, 7:01 PM UTC

You know on BlackBerry AppWorld each submission of an update costs you $20 AND goes through a lengthy approval process. (you need to purchase 10 submissions for $200 at a time). Oh there's a bug in my app? I could fix it in 5 minutes, but too bad..

Re: Apple's Mistake

#8

Post by larsberg » Thu, Nov 19, 2009, 7:02 PM UTC

My biggest problem is that it's a half-assed review process. Neither is it an open platform nor is it a relatively clear and thorough review process like you get on the gaming device platforms (Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony).

I made three applications (only one that was popular - WiFinder) for the AppStore. Every time I interacted with reviewers, either by e-mail or phone, I got the feeling they had no idea what they had signed up for, and had not thought out beforehand how to deliver on the promise of only having quality applications in the AppStore. Which is a shame because it's an old problem.

Re: Apple's Mistake

#9

Post by tokenadult » Thu, Nov 19, 2009, 7:02 PM UTC

Y Combinator RFS 5: Development on Handhelds, mentioned in the submitted article:

http://ycombinator.com/rfs5.html

Re: Apple's Mistake

#10

Post by edw519 » Thu, Nov 19, 2009, 7:03 PM UTC

A customer recently asked me to look into a program that used to run in 5 minutes but now took 1 to 4 hours. It's used by thousands of people all over the world all day long.

It iterated through an array doing 3 SQL SELECTs against non-indexed files for each element. There used to be about 50 elements in the array; now there were more than 5000. I rewrote the whole thing in one day to do a total of 4 SELECTs and run in 12 seconds.

But it took 6 days to get through QA (while the users continued to suffer). QA's biggest complaint? I indented 4 spaces instead of the (unpublished) standard of 5 spaces.

Of all the things I have to deal with, nothing pisses me off more. Software QA is becoming more and more like TSA security at the airport: illogical, and obviously so. Last year, flagrantly unacceptable code was promoted without question while its replacement was held up on a meaningless detail.

I got the feeling from the programmer's quotes in this essay that the same thing is happening at the app store.

We programmers are a funny lot. Make us struggle for business or technical reasons and we adapt beautifully. Make us struggle for something stupid and we just get pissed off and do something else. What a pity.