Steven Frank puts into words what we’ve all been feeling for almost a year:
It continues to kill me, seeing that iPhone apps are still getting rejected for ridiculous reasons.
The Cocoa Touch platform is so great, and this approval nonsense is so absurd that it’s hard for me to reconcile.
Almost a year now, and Apple still has a stranglehold on the platform. I’m an adult, and I am quite sure most iPhone owners are adults, but apparently there still needs to be someone who decides that I can’t use anything that has as much as a nipple in it on my phone. In the mean time, people I know that aren’t very tech-savvy have heard about the news buzz over strange App Store screwups and get completely turned off.
I’m not afraid of competition to the iPhone. I’d be really happy with a good competitor to keep Apple on its toes. I’m much more afraid, however, that something that is qualitatively far worse (but ‘good enough’) than the iPhone platform comes along and wins out because it’s perceived as being more open and people feel like they can do with it what they want. Which may be some really stupid stuff that Apple doesn’t allow on their store. The platform just needs to be ‘good enough’ and not buried in critical news coverage.
Sounds a bit like the old Mac vs. IBM PC battle for supremacy, doesn’t it? We all know how that one ended.
I understand there needs to be a referee. If not, you get one big anarchy lacking any quality. On the other hand, I think a developer should be able to sign something, or earn the trust so he is some kind of “trusted developer”, free to update his apps without needing them to be reviewed.
I totally agree
If apple check apps and rejects them for some technical reason not to break the device or make the battery die in less than 2 hours I can understand. I can also be concerned about copyright infrigments in apps.
But all other reasons are killing me. I can play a bloddy game, add a political, sexual or any other kind of material on my phone if I want, I’m an adult.
Next firmware should have parental control, but I don’t think it won’t change so much in the approval.
And this is very strange the way somme apps are rejected, but “guns app” are okay… because they are legal in US but forbidden in most of others contries around the world.
Wholly agree with you, Frederic. I don’t think anything will change. The moral standards of the one team that uses their opaque process to review things shouldn’t be our business.
I think the idea of a “Trusted Developer” is great. Something that let’s proven developers get fast tracked through the store. What would be better would be submission guidelines though. In my experience it’s not really the wait that gets devs frustrated (unless they are submitting major bug fixes), but the fear of rejection. If we all knew what was and wasn’t acceptable, it’d go a long way towards eliminating many of the rejections we see today. Instead, we have no guidelines and the rules are unknown. :-(