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IPhone Dev Spends $500k on Development, Still Not Approved by Apple
- volida 18y ago75 days?
- tlrobinson 18y agoHalf of a million dollars?!
- ConradHex 18y agoI'm still not sure how that's such a ginormous amount of money.
- jgranby 18y agoCompared to the average iPhone app budget, I'd bet that it is a lot of money.
- danteembermage 18y agoAnd I'm willing to bet that the risk of getting your app banned before you are even off the ground will keep those budgets lower that they would have been, except for perhaps games. That said, even with a 50% chance of getting blocked from the get go it can be still quite profitable, on average, to spend this kind of money on an app. I just wouldn't suggest funding development with credit cards.
- boucher 18y agoThis isn't the average iPhone app. As the article mentions, this requires actual hardware infrastructure -- not something your average iPhone indie is worried about. Did they overspend? Probably. But that doesn't excuse Apple.
- jgranby 18y agoThis isn't the average iPhone app. As the article mentions, this requires actual hardware infrastructure -- not something your average iPhone indie is worried about. Even if the $500k wasn't overspending for what they wanted to do, the part that seems crazy to me was that they spent that money before getting the green light from Apple and with full knowledge that the approval process is opaque, often lengthy, and sometimes seemingly arbitrary. Of course Apple's policy is wrong and unreasonable for developers. But these guys knew that this was the case, and they seem to have acted as if they had no idea.
- boucher 18y ago"before getting the green light from Apple" There is no mechanism for preemptive approval of any kind. Either they could take no risk and not develop the product, or they develop the product with risks. What's inexcusable isn't that the product might be denied, its that they do not yet know. They have to simultaneously act as if it will be in the store in the future, and as if it won't be. I don't know what practical implications that has, but I know its a ridiculous situation to be put in. If Apple insists on the approval process, they have an obligation to do it in a timely manner. They ought to be embarrassed about the number of cases being reported of unreasonably long waits and flat out wrong assessments of SDK violations, but they aren't.
- kragen 18y agoI think it's prety inexcusable that this software, or any software, might be denied.
- jedc 18y agoFor marketing and development. My guess is that a large majority of that must have been marketing.
- bprater 18y agoCheck some of the marketing videos. Pretty impressive motion graphics.
- tlrobinson 18y agoThis seems like it will suffer the same problem as Loopt and other location aware iPhone apps: you have to open the app to update your location. Also, the way this works is Newber gives you a special phone number that people are supposed to call, and it routes it to whatever phone you want. You can then transfer the call between phones by hitting a button in Newber. This is fine for incoming calls, but what about outgoing calls? Do they have a way to intercept outgoing calls from yours phones or something? I did like how the dude's business card said "Professional Silhouette" though.
- illumen 18y agoThis is horrible customer service from Apple.
- jgranby 18y agoIt is indeed, but it's clear from the interview that they knew how opaque and unpredictable Apple's policies are. I'm baffled as to why they went and spent so much money before they knew they'd be accepted.
- rokhayakebe 18y agoWhen they say 1/2 millie they count salaries, server costs, advertisement, VOIP costs, cost to register x thousands of phone numbers, PR (which can easily eat up 3/4 of that) and all that other stuff. I would not be surprised if two guys in a dorm room find a way to make it work for less than 1/10th.
- DLWormwood 18y agoRTFA. In the interview, it's mentioned that most of the expense was in infrastructure on the company's end for handling the call switching technology. This part of the investment would probably work as is when they announce the BlackBerry and Android versions of the client app. They just chose to try and deploy on the iPhone first due to its buzz and early adopter momentum.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- bprater 18y agoInteresting how they have a continuity program (monthly payments). It'll be interesting to see how they do this. Give away the app and then when you are in-app they ask for your credit card number?
- notauser 18y agoThat's how Truphone (iPhone VOIP in/out app) works - it's a free download, and when you have used up the initial credit you have to top up with a credit card.
- tocomment 18y agoWhere are the rules listed by the way? I just finished my first app but I'm not sure it will be accepted.
- boucher 18y agoThey aren't written anywhere. At least, many of them aren't. You can find a list of reasons in the SDK agreement in your developer.apple.com account, but you won't find listed many of the reasons that apps have been rejected, like "limited utility" or "looks too much like our implementation of coverflow" or "using too much bandwidth."
- tocomment 18y agoMine definitely has limited utility! But no less utility than ifart or whatever. I guess I'll give it a shot. It won't bias them against my future submissions, right?
- mattmaroon 18y agoIt's absolutely retarded to spend that kind of money developing on a platform controlled by such a capricious and arbitrary master as Apple. As soon as Android has a userbase, you'll never hear this sort of story again.
- dmix 18y agoIsn't that what they said about Unix when Windows was released?
- jerf 18y agoShow me the Windows app that Microsoft said "You can't sell that" to the app developer. I mean, sure, they've played games ("DOS ain't done 'till Lotus doesn't run"), but flat-out blocking something on Windows? (If you want to cite Microsoft for something like this, you might be able to find an XBox Arcade related example.)
- allenbrunson 18y agookay, how about netscape. microsoft went to them in the early days of the web, and said, effectively: "you can't sell netscape navigator on windows. you can put your browsers on all the other platforms, but windows is for us. otherwise, we'll crush you." everybody knows what happened after that.
- dmix 18y agoWindows was not a closed environment like the app store. I was comparing the comment to how the developer community during the launch of Windows saying Unix would win in the long run. They said Windows was too restrictive and your letting a for-profit business control the platform is too risky, so users would naturally move to the open platform. But the average, mainstream user, was content with Windows because they were satisfied as long they had their Lotus 1-2-3 or Excel.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- ericb 18y ago500k on development, 70 days of panic, followed by 30k on PR to pressure Apple to accept it.
- aswanson 18y agoApple has drifted so far from the spirit Woz infused it with with the Apple II: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II From the article:Wozniak's open design and the Apple II's multiple expansion slots permitted a wide variety of third-party devices to expand the capabilities of the machine. The true engineer ethos. Let people add on, build, and convert the system to their needs. Now it's just shove shiny expensive stuff at them and don't trust the user or developer to change anything. What a way to treat users, like children.
- thomasmallen 18y agoYep. The iPhone is a console.
- iigs 18y agoYes, and it sucks, but it has been this way for a pretty long time. Jobs was never about expandability/hackability -- the original Macintosh required a special tool to open the case, wherein you could do nothing to it as it had no user serviceable parts. I had never looked before, but it doesn't appear that it even had any socketed ICs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Macintosh-motherboard.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Macintosh-motherboard.jpg , but it did have a proper font silk screened on this board that nobody ever saw. Jobs has used engineering as a means to create the experience -- Woz used the experience as a means to create engineer{s, ing}, something that I owe my love of computers and even my nickname to. :) That said, so long as Apple essentially has a monopoly on the smartphone experience, it behooves them to control the experience of the device (via third party applications) with an iron fist -- there's very little down side to arbitrary or even counterproductive behavior so long as the experience is maintained. Should ecosystem ever matter more than the device experience, Apple will be forced to sing a different tune, but given Nokia + MS's head start and performance since the release of the iPhone I wouldn't be hopeful.
- allenbrunson 18y agolooks like the ROMs are socketed. and that's the part that you'd be most likely to want changed.
- thomasmallen 18y agoCall me crazy, but I think that a solid business plan doesn't depend on the whims of a single party.
- rgr 18y agoAll new business plans are risky. Dependencies on 3rd parties add risk, but if the potential rewards are big enough the risk is worth taking.
- lux 18y agoWhile this is a LONG time and definitely Apple needs to improve their support of developers with at least a status message of some kind, it could be that the app is complex enough that it's taking a long time due to that complexity. Apple does review all the code and test it out, so maybe that has something to do with it. Either way, Apple needs to start communicating! It must be awful for these guys to wait like this not knowing one way or the other, and with that much riding on it. Wow.
- boucher 18y agoThing is, Apple doesn't review code. They review applications (which isn't the same thing). More importantly, the review process is arbitrary. There are no strict guidelines, and no strict technical analysis is performed. This is easily proven by looking at the number of apps on the store using private SDKs, and the number of cases where apps have been rejected for using private SDKs even when they do not.
- lux 18y agoI didn't know that. I guess I got the impression from some peoples' comments on the web that they did... Thanks for the clarification :)
- jodrellblank 18y agoThis title is annoying - who thinks the amount you spent on development should have any bearing at all on whether Apple approve your app? Not me, anyway. $500k shouldn't guarantee you an approval.
- kragen 18y agoI don't think that's the deal; I think the reason it's interesting is that Newber has $500k hanging in the balance, and Apple's commitment is zero. They can vaporize that $500k instantly by saying no, or slowly by never responding. This is not a good position to be in, and it dramatizes what a lot of people (investors more than hackers) have been feeling about iPhone development.
- riobard 18y agoEmm, Newber's logo looks similar to Ubuntu's
- radley 18y agoiNoob
- sireat 18y agoIt seems the process of getting approved by Apple is about as opaque as process of getting approved by DMOZ. At least the DMOZ had/have the excuse of being volunteer run.
- AndrewWarner 18y agoThis is why there are more fart apps for the iPhone than working word processors. Who would spend big money on an uncertain future?