141–150 of 285 posts
I totally agree with the article. However I wonder what prompted PG to write it. Did one of their startups' apps get rejected recently?
Part of Paul's reasoning depends on Apps being central to the iPhone experience the same way software is central to the desktop experience. I'm not totally sure this is the case. While apps are certainly a major component to the iPhone, are they really the major factor in end-user adoption? With the exception of games, how many killer iPhone apps are there that don't already ship with the phone? The phone shipped for…
Any app that makes someone get an iPhone instead of something else is a "killer app" as far as Apple is concerned, even if it only sold a total of 27 copies and lost the developer a lot of money. So even if the iPhone doesn't have any one killer app, the sheer diversity of apps means there is probably a killer app out there for most people, and that is vital for Apple.
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Agreed. The last company I worked at we had some similar idiocy. We had a backend process that connected out to a network and did some things. However, the network it connected to changed their protocol, so our backend process was broken - didn't do anything - completely non functional. We created a fix, but had to wait for it to go through QA for ages. What's the worst that could happen? It doesn't do anything like…
The worst? Data Loss, or corruption, which is worse than "not working". Likewise, more likely it could just not work well, be buggy and require several updates to get it right, burning out your team's (or your company's) image with the customer. Before you deployed your fix, it's whoever changed the protocol at fault. After that, it's you that can't fix it. Again, not justifing it taking ages, just saying there's nev…
The worst case was that it maxes out the connection and burns through bandwidth. But that's something that can be monitored.
The customer would have rather had something working with the network, than something broken with the network.
In that particular circumstance, there's always an excuse to skip QA. IMHO.
Minor note: I think "inoculate" is misspelled.
Talk about it. I just got a rejection today for a major bugfix on my last update. The only change in the update is to use utf-8 encoding---one tiny change on one line of code. After 2 weeks, they tell me they can't approve the update because I'm using undocumented APIs in a couple places. Sure, OK, looks like I was using some methods that went from deprecated to undocumented... but that's exactly what's in the store…
I have a simple "free" app in the iPhone App Store. It lets users browse "available" Web domains. One feature is a BUY button that forwards them to Godaddy.com, if they want to buy the domain.
I don't make any money from Godaddy.
The app has been approved for a while, but I wanted to patch one little bug, so I submitted a patch.
... And waited two weeks. Apple's testers found a bug that was in the original approved app, and asked me to re-submit.
... And I waited three weeks. This is classic: Apple rejects my app again because they want to test the domain "buying" feature on Godaddy.
It's a website! Not even my app! Not even a new feature.
Please kill me.
I totally agree with the article. However I wonder what prompted PG to write it. Did one of their startups' apps get rejected recently?
A lot more than one. The App Store is tied with US immigration as the biggest source of complaints I hear from founders.
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Faustian bargain? Assholes? Evil? .. really, if this is the most serious accusation of "evil" one can level at Apple then it isn't really going to affect my buying decisions. It's not like they're dealing in small arms or manufacturing cluster bombs. If you step back and think about it all Apple is doing is stuffing up their own app store, which can be classified as monumentally stupid and short sighted but not reall…
General Electric, now there's a company that's "evil". http://www.google.com/search?q=%22general+electric%22+%2Bevi... Do you see my point? To anybody outside the app development community it's going to look a little bit "self important" for developers to be using such strong language and talking of boycotts over something most folks would agree is not evil. I agree what Apple is doing is stupid, in the long term the…
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That's not what I, or the original commenter, was talking about. Having no approval doesn't mean chaos for carrier's networks.
Conversely, having a horrible train-wreck of an approval process like Apple does clearly doesn't mean you can't have unparalleled success either. So I guess we're back to square one.
Though I can't marshall any evidence to support this claim, it was specifically not my impression that Apple was a company pro developers loved working with before the iPhone.
Fully agree. I recall in particular reading John Carmack a few years back talking about how he was glad Apple wasn't as dominant as Microsoft, because they were far harder to work with. I wish I could remember the quote well enough to search accurately for it.
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..
I was at the BB Dev Con last week and their tech lead explained the approval process: "they load it, make sure it doesn't crash the phone, then sign off on it."