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I'm an app store developer, and if Apple opens the doors, let me tell you what will happen : First of all, there will be hardcore porn immediately. Boob apps w

I'm an app store developer, and if Apple opens the doors, let me tell you what will happen : First of all, there will be hardcore porn immediately. Boob apps will flood the store, because that's what makes money. If apple implements a flagging mechanism, then you will be one click away from opening a website to purchase hard core porn (I'm looking at you On The Go Girls). Lots of people will create apps with 5 pictures and call it "Celebrity News". For example Britney Spears News, etc. Apps will be rereleased every single day so they are always visible on the app store new releases page. People will upload apps that do nothing but just have a title people will search for. And of course, apps that call a pay hotline somewhere. With the amount of money people are spending on the app store, and the fact that people are looking for cheap entertainment rather than useful tools, the app store would be a heaven for spammers and scammers. If Apple ever unlocked the gates, it would be the absolute end of the app store. I have a phone number of a reviewer and I talk to him every now and then. They get a lot of crap. The gate is not to QC an app, it's to prevent the app store from being a crapware and spammers paradise.

wmf 17y ago
If Apple did away with the review process, there's no reason they'd have to keep funneling all apps through the store. They could allow/force the cesspool apps to be distributed through the Web.
ddrouin 17y ago
The best compromise would be to trust a given application after its first (or first few) review(s) and allow its developer to update it without going through the review process afterward. This would keep the gate for spammy applications and establish a relation of trust between the devs and Apple. Of course, this is unlikely to happen as Apple is using the review process to make sure the apps are not calling private APIs or violating whatever rules Apple decides to apply. But giving up this last layer of "security" for Apple to allow for better developer AND user experience would be the best move Apple could do to improve the whole App Store frustations from developers.
- lethargus 17y ago
  I do not believe they should just blindly get rid of the review process of app updates, but I do think that there should be some priority given to them. I believe that a developer should be able to push updates out to their apps with relative quickness compared to getting a new app approved. This would even benefit Apple for the applications that are teetering on making a decent amount of sales but are lagging in the sales due to some kind of problem/stability issue.
- cmelbye 17y ago
  Well, the problem of filtering private API usage would be easy to fix. They're already using an automated tool to detect it, so why not just scan the app right when the user uploads it? That would actually be better than the current system. Right now, if you upload an app that uses private APIs, you have to wait for however long it takes to actually get to a human reviewer (2-14 days) and then they run the tool, wasting a lot of time.
mrshoe 17y ago
Apple shouldn't open the gates to the App Store, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't open the gates to the iPhone. If you want to be listed in the App Store and have Apple handle your payment processing and even a bit of marketing for you, you're going to have to go through their approval process. Every single store in the world decides which products it will and won't sell. The App Store isn't, and shouldn't be, any different. However, on the Mac platform you can develop an app and sell it on your own web site or put it on a CD in a box and sell it at Best Buy or any other store. You can't do that on the iPhone. I guess opening up the iPhone platform wouldn't really help DHH, since I'm sure he wants his app listed and sold in the App Store, but I can see why developers expect more parity between the two platforms (Mac and iPhone). However, I can also see how it's easier for Apple to provide a better (and more consistent) customer experience when the App Store is the only way to buy and install apps. And since Apple cares more about customers, and customers don't really care about the openness of their phone's OS... that's probably not going to change any time soon.
- mechanical_fish 17y ago
  On the Mac platform you can develop an app and sell it on your own web site Yes. And you can also develop malware and give it away on your own website. And then, when customers complain to Apple, they can do... what, exactly? In other words, DHH is wrong when he suggests that the App Store isn't about security. Sure, the App Store is not about prescreening for security holes -- obviously they can't find every hole or every trojan in their pitiful half-hour code review. But if every app goes through the store, and every store app can be revoked, and every store app comes attached to a known submitter with a valid identity and credit card... You can get a trojan through the system. But you very likely can't do it more than once, it won't survive long in the wild after it's detected, and the FBI has a paper trail to your house.
  - middayc 17y ago
    so how many viruses have you downloaded to your Mac in last year?
  - bad_user 17y ago
aditya 17y ago
If that's what the market wants, that's what the market wants. Are you saying that these apps will suddenly (by virtue of being approved) be listed on the top apps lists, and become popular? If so, what's wrong with that, let the people decide what the people want, no? There's spammers and scammers on the web, and people fall for them all the time, is that a good argument to police the web, then?
- maxklein 17y ago
  It's not what the market wants. It's what the suppliers want. Let me give an analogy: There is a country with no pineapples. Someone grows a pineapple farm, and sells pineapples. There are no other pineapples, so he charges a lot for them. He becomes rich. Other farmers hear of this and start growing pineapples - they become rich at the start, but as pineapples become more available, soon the price of pineapples is the same as everywhere else. But people have a lot of invested resources in pineapples, so they start selling at discounts. There are more pineapples than consumers, so people start getting aggressive with their sales. The guys who made the money leave the unprofitable market to go sell maize, but the late entries who have just invested in pineapples, and the people who were dirt poor, are still battling on, trying to sell their pineapples. They start harvesting unripe pineapples and heating them to make them seem ripe quicker. People get disillusioned with all the shit pineapples they are getting and decide to rather buy some other fruit without all the competition. When they do buy pineapples, they stick to very old and trusted names - new pineapple sellers are automatically assumed to be doing something corny. -- What I'm saying is - the suppliers will destroy the market.
  - aditya 17y ago
    You're saying that because there will be a ton of porn/scammy apps on the app store, people are going to stop wanting apps? I'm not sure what you're implying, so could you tell me what you think, realistically, will happen if the approval process lets everyone in, that cannot be solved by smart filters (ie. top apps lists, child-safe apps, as voted upon by people using the store)
  - jamesbritt 17y ago
gcheong 17y ago
"The gate is not to QC an app, it's to prevent the app store from being a crapware and spammers paradise." Is this what your reviewer friend told you? Because part of the problem is that Apple hasn't said much if anything about just what the review process is for, so everyone is left to speculate while having to decipher arbitrary and vague rejection reasons.
jsdalton 17y ago
Okay, I hate snarky replies like the one I'm about to make, but regardless, here goes... I'm a web developer, and if we were to open up the Internet, let me tell you what will happen: First of all, there will be hardcore porn immediately. Boob websites will flood the Internet, because that's what makes money. If the Internet implements a flagging mechanism, then you will be one click away from opening a website to purchase hard core porn. Lots of people will create websites with 5 pictures and call it "Celebrity News". For example Britney Spears News, etc. Websites will have new content every single day so they are always at the top of Google search results. People will create websites that do nothing but just have a title people will search for. With the amount of money people are spending online, and the fact that people are looking for cheap entertainment rather than useful tools, the Internet would be a heaven for spammers and scammers. If we ever unlocked the gates, it would be the absolute end of the Internet. I have a phone number of a website reviewer and I talk to him every now and then. They get a lot of crap. The gate is not to QC a website, it's to prevent the Internet from being a crapware and spammers paradise.
- mechanical_fish 17y ago
  Oh, you are so close to enlightenment you can practically taste it! Or maybe you are enlightened and this is your attempt at a Zen koan. If so: pretty good. The iPhone already has a built-in free-for-all free-of-charge Transmetropolitan Interzone, where you can develop and publish whatever you want, pron and scammers run free, and nothing is controlled by anyone, for better or for worse. It's called "Mobile Safari". The rest of the iPhone experience -- the App Store -- is different from that. That may turn out to be a major reason why the App Store is worth so much money.
  - jsdalton 17y ago
    Yes, the restrictions are definitely the reason the App Store is worth so much money. Asking Apple to remove them is akin to demanding that movie theater owners allow outside food and beverages and forgo their $8 popcorn. My point is that there is a kind of fearmongering in comments like the one above mind -- that if somehow Apple were to open up its platform to the wild and wooly world, it'd soon be overrun by every form of scam and debauchery known to man. Countless examples prove otherwise. There is no "reason" for Apple to maintain these restrictions other than money. (Oh, and it looks like enlightenment will have to wait after the blow to my karma I just took on that comment above.)
drewcrawford 17y ago
I'm also an app developer, and I agree with your assessment. But... how the hell can Google not get GV in the store? Or Google Navigation? There's spam in the app store now. But we're missing out on multiple, high-quality, well-backed apps because Apple's busy playing hardball with app review. There are effective community spam countermeasures (see XNA) that work, and work well. I wouldn't be opposed to charging a per-app submission fee to keep spam out. Of course simply replacing app review with nothing would be a disaster. But nobody's seriously suggesting that. The computer industry has decades of experience dealing with spam. The only really dumb idea is to hire full-time employees to find it by hand.
jamesbritt 17y ago
Interesting. I have a G1, and anyone can release apps to the app market. While there's crap available, it is nowhere anything like your scenario. Maybe I just don't spend enough time checking out new apps.
dhh 17y ago
This get a lot of crap regardless: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2146-theres-quality-control-for-you-this-is http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2146-theres-quality-control-f... With 140,000+ apps, the bulk are bound to be shit. Deal with spammers and hardcore porn like every other site on the web deals with it. "Is this inappropriate?" flags. It's worked fine for places like Flickr to keep out the pornsters, it can work fine here. This is a sham argument for control.
BCM43 17y ago
Really? How is the android market any different? This has not happened there.
- tumult 17y ago
  Have you ever looked at the Android market? Aside from the porn, it has all of those problems.
darshan 17y ago
I don't see how you can be anything but completely wrong on this. Why have none of your predictions come true for the Android Market? (Yes, it's quite a bit smaller than Apple's App Store, but it's still plenty big enough that if you were on track, we'd see evidence there.)
- jsz0 17y ago
  Google doesn't allow porno apps in the Market: "Nudity and Sexually Explicit Material We don't allow content that contains nudity, graphic sex acts, or sexually explicit material. We also don't allow content that drives traffic to commercial pornography sites." Gratuitous updates are a problem on Android. I find it hard to believe that apps like Wifi Analyzer or Mabilo Ringtones are really being updated 2-3 times a week. Maybe but it seems strange to me. They could just be honestly submitting daily builds or something. Supposedly 1.6 has made improvements to the Market that might nullify the problem (I'm stuck on 1.5 so I wouldn't know firsthand) For security concerns we did see the fake Bank of America app make it into the Android Market briefly. It's not a widespread problem but it's happened so we can't ignore it.
  - darshan 17y ago
    Google doesn't allow porno apps in the Market Yes, that's the point. DHH isn't recommending removing all rules; he's recommending eliminating the approval process to get apps/updates into the Store. Apple would still, of course, have the ability to remove apps that violated the TOS. The Android Market is run in just this manner, and it isn't overrun with pornography. So having rules and enforcing them but not having to pre-approve every release seems to work. Gratuitous updates are a problem on Android. While there do appear to be some developers pushing fake updates, I'm not sure that exactly constitutes a problem. If it ever gets out of hand, there are a lot of ways this could be managed that don't involve pre-approval.
    - wanderr 17y ago
      The apps I usually see frequent updates are apps where there's a lot of bugfixing or innovation going on, nothing wrong with frequent updates there. I also think fake updates will tend to backfire on abusers, because users are presented with two options: upgrade, or uninstall.

wmf 17y ago

If Apple did away with the review process, there's no reason they'd have to keep funneling all apps through the store. They could allow/force the cesspool apps to be distributed through the Web.

ddrouin 17y ago

The best compromise would be to trust a given application after its first (or first few) review(s) and allow its developer to update it without going through the review process afterward. This would keep the gate for spammy applications and establish a relation of trust between the devs and Apple. Of course, this is unlikely to happen as Apple is using the review process to make sure the apps are not calling private APIs or violating whatever rules Apple decides to apply. But giving up this last layer of "security" for Apple to allow for better developer AND user experience would be the best move Apple could do to improve the whole App Store frustations from developers.

lethargus 17y ago
I do not believe they should just blindly get rid of the review process of app updates, but I do think that there should be some priority given to them. I believe that a developer should be able to push updates out to their apps with relative quickness compared to getting a new app approved. This would even benefit Apple for the applications that are teetering on making a decent amount of sales but are lagging in the sales due to some kind of problem/stability issue.
cmelbye 17y ago
Well, the problem of filtering private API usage would be easy to fix. They're already using an automated tool to detect it, so why not just scan the app right when the user uploads it? That would actually be better than the current system. Right now, if you upload an app that uses private APIs, you have to wait for however long it takes to actually get to a human reviewer (2-14 days) and then they run the tool, wasting a lot of time.

mrshoe 17y ago

Apple shouldn't open the gates to the App Store, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't open the gates to the iPhone. If you want to be listed in the App Store and have Apple handle your payment processing and even a bit of marketing for you, you're going to have to go through their approval process. Every single store in the world decides which products it will and won't sell. The App Store isn't, and shouldn't be, any different. However, on the Mac platform you can develop an app and sell it on your own web site or put it on a CD in a box and sell it at Best Buy or any other store. You can't do that on the iPhone. I guess opening up the iPhone platform wouldn't really help DHH, since I'm sure he wants his app listed and sold in the App Store, but I can see why developers expect more parity between the two platforms (Mac and iPhone). However, I can also see how it's easier for Apple to provide a better (and more consistent) customer experience when the App Store is the only way to buy and install apps. And since Apple cares more about customers, and customers don't really care about the openness of their phone's OS... that's probably not going to change any time soon.

mechanical_fish 17y ago
On the Mac platform you can develop an app and sell it on your own web site Yes. And you can also develop malware and give it away on your own website. And then, when customers complain to Apple, they can do... what, exactly? In other words, DHH is wrong when he suggests that the App Store isn't about security. Sure, the App Store is not about prescreening for security holes -- obviously they can't find every hole or every trojan in their pitiful half-hour code review. But if every app goes through the store, and every store app can be revoked, and every store app comes attached to a known submitter with a valid identity and credit card... You can get a trojan through the system. But you very likely can't do it more than once, it won't survive long in the wild after it's detected, and the FBI has a paper trail to your house.
- middayc 17y ago
  so how many viruses have you downloaded to your Mac in last year?
- bad_user 17y ago

aditya 17y ago

If that's what the market wants, that's what the market wants. Are you saying that these apps will suddenly (by virtue of being approved) be listed on the top apps lists, and become popular? If so, what's wrong with that, let the people decide what the people want, no? There's spammers and scammers on the web, and people fall for them all the time, is that a good argument to police the web, then?

maxklein 17y ago
It's not what the market wants. It's what the suppliers want. Let me give an analogy: There is a country with no pineapples. Someone grows a pineapple farm, and sells pineapples. There are no other pineapples, so he charges a lot for them. He becomes rich. Other farmers hear of this and start growing pineapples - they become rich at the start, but as pineapples become more available, soon the price of pineapples is the same as everywhere else. But people have a lot of invested resources in pineapples, so they start selling at discounts. There are more pineapples than consumers, so people start getting aggressive with their sales. The guys who made the money leave the unprofitable market to go sell maize, but the late entries who have just invested in pineapples, and the people who were dirt poor, are still battling on, trying to sell their pineapples. They start harvesting unripe pineapples and heating them to make them seem ripe quicker. People get disillusioned with all the shit pineapples they are getting and decide to rather buy some other fruit without all the competition. When they do buy pineapples, they stick to very old and trusted names - new pineapple sellers are automatically assumed to be doing something corny. -- What I'm saying is - the suppliers will destroy the market.
- aditya 17y ago
  You're saying that because there will be a ton of porn/scammy apps on the app store, people are going to stop wanting apps? I'm not sure what you're implying, so could you tell me what you think, realistically, will happen if the approval process lets everyone in, that cannot be solved by smart filters (ie. top apps lists, child-safe apps, as voted upon by people using the store)
- jamesbritt 17y ago

gcheong 17y ago

"The gate is not to QC an app, it's to prevent the app store from being a crapware and spammers paradise." Is this what your reviewer friend told you? Because part of the problem is that Apple hasn't said much if anything about just what the review process is for, so everyone is left to speculate while having to decipher arbitrary and vague rejection reasons.

jsdalton 17y ago

Okay, I hate snarky replies like the one I'm about to make, but regardless, here goes... I'm a web developer, and if we were to open up the Internet, let me tell you what will happen: First of all, there will be hardcore porn immediately. Boob websites will flood the Internet, because that's what makes money. If the Internet implements a flagging mechanism, then you will be one click away from opening a website to purchase hard core porn. Lots of people will create websites with 5 pictures and call it "Celebrity News". For example Britney Spears News, etc. Websites will have new content every single day so they are always at the top of Google search results. People will create websites that do nothing but just have a title people will search for. With the amount of money people are spending online, and the fact that people are looking for cheap entertainment rather than useful tools, the Internet would be a heaven for spammers and scammers. If we ever unlocked the gates, it would be the absolute end of the Internet. I have a phone number of a website reviewer and I talk to him every now and then. They get a lot of crap. The gate is not to QC a website, it's to prevent the Internet from being a crapware and spammers paradise.

mechanical_fish 17y ago
Oh, you are so close to enlightenment you can practically taste it! Or maybe you are enlightened and this is your attempt at a Zen koan. If so: pretty good. The iPhone already has a built-in free-for-all free-of-charge Transmetropolitan Interzone, where you can develop and publish whatever you want, pron and scammers run free, and nothing is controlled by anyone, for better or for worse. It's called "Mobile Safari". The rest of the iPhone experience -- the App Store -- is different from that. That may turn out to be a major reason why the App Store is worth so much money.
- jsdalton 17y ago
  Yes, the restrictions are definitely the reason the App Store is worth so much money. Asking Apple to remove them is akin to demanding that movie theater owners allow outside food and beverages and forgo their $8 popcorn. My point is that there is a kind of fearmongering in comments like the one above mind -- that if somehow Apple were to open up its platform to the wild and wooly world, it'd soon be overrun by every form of scam and debauchery known to man. Countless examples prove otherwise. There is no "reason" for Apple to maintain these restrictions other than money. (Oh, and it looks like enlightenment will have to wait after the blow to my karma I just took on that comment above.)

drewcrawford 17y ago

I'm also an app developer, and I agree with your assessment. But... how the hell can Google not get GV in the store? Or Google Navigation? There's spam in the app store now. But we're missing out on multiple, high-quality, well-backed apps because Apple's busy playing hardball with app review. There are effective community spam countermeasures (see XNA) that work, and work well. I wouldn't be opposed to charging a per-app submission fee to keep spam out. Of course simply replacing app review with nothing would be a disaster. But nobody's seriously suggesting that. The computer industry has decades of experience dealing with spam. The only really dumb idea is to hire full-time employees to find it by hand.

jamesbritt 17y ago

Interesting. I have a G1, and anyone can release apps to the app market. While there's crap available, it is nowhere anything like your scenario. Maybe I just don't spend enough time checking out new apps.

dhh 17y ago

This get a lot of crap regardless: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2146-theres-quality-control-for-you-this-is http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2146-theres-quality-control-f... With 140,000+ apps, the bulk are bound to be shit. Deal with spammers and hardcore porn like every other site on the web deals with it. "Is this inappropriate?" flags. It's worked fine for places like Flickr to keep out the pornsters, it can work fine here. This is a sham argument for control.

BCM43 17y ago

Really? How is the android market any different? This has not happened there.

tumult 17y ago
Have you ever looked at the Android market? Aside from the porn, it has all of those problems.

darshan 17y ago

I don't see how you can be anything but completely wrong on this. Why have none of your predictions come true for the Android Market? (Yes, it's quite a bit smaller than Apple's App Store, but it's still plenty big enough that if you were on track, we'd see evidence there.)

jsz0 17y ago
Google doesn't allow porno apps in the Market: "Nudity and Sexually Explicit Material We don't allow content that contains nudity, graphic sex acts, or sexually explicit material. We also don't allow content that drives traffic to commercial pornography sites." Gratuitous updates are a problem on Android. I find it hard to believe that apps like Wifi Analyzer or Mabilo Ringtones are really being updated 2-3 times a week. Maybe but it seems strange to me. They could just be honestly submitting daily builds or something. Supposedly 1.6 has made improvements to the Market that might nullify the problem (I'm stuck on 1.5 so I wouldn't know firsthand) For security concerns we did see the fake Bank of America app make it into the Android Market briefly. It's not a widespread problem but it's happened so we can't ignore it.
- darshan 17y ago
  Google doesn't allow porno apps in the Market Yes, that's the point. DHH isn't recommending removing all rules; he's recommending eliminating the approval process to get apps/updates into the Store. Apple would still, of course, have the ability to remove apps that violated the TOS. The Android Market is run in just this manner, and it isn't overrun with pornography. So having rules and enforcing them but not having to pre-approve every release seems to work. Gratuitous updates are a problem on Android. While there do appear to be some developers pushing fake updates, I'm not sure that exactly constitutes a problem. If it ever gets out of hand, there are a lot of ways this could be managed that don't involve pre-approval.
  - wanderr 17y ago
    The apps I usually see frequent updates are apps where there's a lot of bugfixing or innovation going on, nothing wrong with frequent updates there. I also think fake updates will tend to backfire on abusers, because users are presented with two options: upgrade, or uninstall.