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A Story of Why Devs Should Think Twice about Developing for the iPhone

55 points by theappfarm 17y ago

pxlpshr 17y ago
This was the state of the AppStore over a year ago and I've continued to hear the same story from various sources month over month. It's not really a surprise anymore, so it begs the question of whether or not they did research. They should complete this blog post and make it a Top 10 Reasons Why Not To Develop for the AppStore. The four bullet points are scratching the surface of many issues that compound into a one big frustration. The thing is, there is also a list of the Top 10 Reasons Why You Should Develop for the AppStore. That list forces you to swallow the crap you have to put up with well, because Apple has cured so many of the much bigger headaches.
- cakesy 17y ago
  Number one reason to use the App store is that it is very easy to make large piles of money.
  - stanleydrew 17y ago
    Do you have any data to back this up?
mtholking 17y ago
We have also had a submission rejected because of content in the application description. Even though the binary submission was not altered, we were forced to re-upload the binary and wait an additional >2 weeks for the next round of review feedback for removing ONE sentence from the description. There should be a separate review queue for application description, the current system is incredibly inefficient.
- stcredzero 17y ago
  Even though the binary submission was not altered, we were forced to re-upload the binary and wait an additional >2 weeks for the next round of review feedback for removing ONE sentence from the description. This smacks of the sort of bureaucratic mediocrity which Steve Jobs should hate and have hunted down, quickly and without mercy. It's exactly the sort of big company rot that slows a big company down.
  - ellyagg 17y ago
    Unfortunately, like google, apple has never been big on customer service, of which this is a sort.
    - steveklabnik 17y ago
      Really? Never been big on customer service? Every time that I (or anyone else that I know) has ever had a problem with an Apple product, they've taken swift care of the issue. They've given me a brand new iPod on the spot when an old one broke before. Apple's customer service is one of the main reasons that people buy Apple products. Not that the app queue doesn't suck, don't get me wrong.
      - blasdel 17y ago
        For consumers sure, but for bigger players their customer service is as bad as Google's. The App Store's unfriendliness is not new -- it's just the awful iTMS experience with a larger audience. Institutional hardware customers have been getting fucked on a regular basis ever since the return of Jobs.
    - yardie 17y ago
      I believe just about every newspaper, rating agency, and practically everyone else who uses an Apple product would disagree with you. I will agree with you that Apple is not big on customer service. But, when the bar is set so low, they are the tallest dwarf in the room.
- gfodor 17y ago
  For the sake of the rest of us, care to elaborate?
lacker 17y ago
Maybe you should just not put other companies' copyrighted game names in your keywords. It sounds like Apple is purposefully slowing you down because they consider you to be malicious.
- zyb09 17y ago
  What an evil devil you are putting the name of one mini-game of a mini-game collection, that shipped as a bonus to an accessory, in YOUR keywords - thereby harvesting all the hard labor done by Nintendo. Outrage! You absolutely deserve to be punished by Apple (which is obviously just doing the job your parents should have done a long time ago!)
  - enntwo 17y ago
    I assume lacker's point is in reference to the use of the word "Wii" itself, which is clearly a Nintendo trademark. It is not unreasonable that Apple does not want to have an app using a recognizable trademark of another company. And if you read the article, you notice that the reason they were rejected for using Wii, is because Apple felt that it was unrelated to the app, and was used as a keyword to drive search results. (Which was not the case, but from just looking at the keywords is a reasonable response). The issue the article brings up with Apple is the overall process of such a small issue resulting in an overall 40+ day delay of release due to a poor reviewal process. The article was must less critial of the actual banning of the term "Wii".
    - zyb09 17y ago
      yeah but what's the big deal.. why don't they just relax and let people use "wii" as tag. If nintendo gets angry (which might never happen to begin with) just do a quick DELETE FROM Keyword WHERE tag='wii'. Problem solved. If they would please stop being so picky about everything. There wouldn't be so much complains about the approval process, if people were thinking its fair what Apple is doing.
- credo 17y ago
  It looks like Apple did the right thing here. They stopped the app from using a term copyrighted by Nintendo. They also communicated the rejection reason to the developer clearly. Ultimately, this is probably going to be a win-win for both sides. Apple does the right thing. The app description and keywords don't mislead users (and as a result of the blog post complaining about Apple, the app also gets a lot of free publicity)
brianobush 17y ago
and to add on to the dev hurdle, you must code in obj-c and have a mac. I am sure there are ways around the mac part, but limiting the target language already discourages many devs from building apps for the iphone. i myself am slowly becoming an android fan (ASE - http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/wiki/FAQ http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/wiki/FAQ)
- enntwo 17y ago
  You are not limited to developing native apps, in fact, even if you are comfortable in developing in Obj-C, for applications of a certain size using PhoneGap or YUI to make cross-platform WebKit based normal apps is perfectly reasonable. For apps of significant size or those with performance issues, it is not unreasonable to expect to have to use one native language, such as most game consoles do, or even Android does as pointed out in your link: "If you have performance concerns for your application, it's probably better to use the standard Android SDK (or NDK) where you'll have more control over the system." Sure you could write a huge app in ASE instead of being restricted to Java, but its not recommended. In the same way you can write a huge app in PhoneGap over Obj-C, but it is not recommended.
- ruslan 17y ago
  Ain't Android limiting you to Java only, while for iPhone you can develop in any language which can be compliled into ARM ELF object file and linked by ld ? Beside the UI part of course. I hate developing for iPhone too cause Obj-C is not a language, it is a piece of messy crap! It makes code look like spaghetti. I receive a great pleasure developing for Android, yet Java is far from the language of my choice though it's far better than Obj-C. PS. What disappoints me about Android is that a simple "hello world" app consumes at least 12MB of RAM because of a running copy of Java/Dalvik VM. Google has to do something about it.
  - cakesy 17y ago
    No, you can program in almost any language for Android, a change that was added about 3 months ago. Objective-c is great, much better than java or c# if you ask me. Are you sure you actually program for Android, you seem to be missing quite a bit of knowledge.
jackfoxy 17y ago
Now that Verizon will have a serious marketing launch of a phone designed for Android in November, things could get interesting.
- josefresco 17y ago
  It's already happening, turn on your TV.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
NathanKP 17y ago
From the article: Sure Apple has its reasons, namely pushing its 85k or 100k or 250k apps commercials to prove it has the most evolved app ecosystem versus its peers. But if Apple doesn’t fix these problems soon, those numbers will begin to mean less and less, and at some point the number of apps in the App store will be about as meaningful as the number of videos uploaded to YouTube. That doesn't really make sense to me. Apple has strict quality control for the exact reason that they don't want their store to turn into YouTube. Turning down apps is how they maintain quality.
- alex_c 17y ago
  Turning down apps to maintain quality, I'll give you that (even though there's a lot of room to argue the specifics). Turning down bug fixes for stupid reasons, though? How does that maintain quality, if it takes over a month to push a fix to an app? Eventually devs get sick of it (especially if their apps are closer to the hobby end of the spectrum) and stop maintaining them. Can't blame them.
  - NathanKP 17y ago
    I agree with you on that. It doesn't make sense to turn down an App for "stupid reasons." Its just that Apples concept of a valid reason for turning down an app is obviously much broader than most people like. However, I have to wonder if it was perhaps the other way around whether we would have people complaining about how trashy the app store was and how their decent app was buried under loads of other spammy/trashy apps. I personally think Apple is a little bit too strict, but I don't want too much lenience either.
    - alex_c 17y ago
      However, I have to wonder if it was perhaps the other way around whether we would have people complaining about how trashy the app store was and how their decent app was buried under loads of other spammy/trashy apps. Yup - that would be Facebook.
awolf 17y ago
Apple rejected the app because the developer sought to use another company's product name and game title to bolster their own sales. Seems reasonable to me- at least as far as App Store rejections go.
- mrkurt 17y ago
  If that's all you got out of it, you seriously need to read the article again. These flippant non-responses to Apple related problems are useless and displace actual useful contributions. As someone who enjoys useful contributions... I disapprove!
  - awolf 17y ago
    Granted- apple made thier usual poor developer-relations moves that they normally do- but a rejection is still justified in this case. I'm surpirsed that the developers feel justified in making a public complaint out of this.
jimboyoungblood 17y ago
My personal favorite reason for rejection is "Your big icon doesn't match the little icon". I've gotten that twice so far.
- cakesy 17y ago
  I have had that too, but it is not unreasonable. The worst I have had is because I used a SIMILAR font and style to a well known tv show, in a quiz about that tv show.
  - DenisM 17y ago
    Wow, that's probably the worst one I've seen so far.
- hboon 17y ago
  But I remember they were explicit in saying it has to be similar/same in the guidelines.
dstorrs 17y ago
The sheer arbitrariness of many Apple rejections makes it pretty clear what's going on: applications are put into a queue, a group of approval guys pop the queue, review, and either approve or reject. But they aren't given clear standards for approval, so your results vary based on the whim of whichever reviewer you get. Which suggests an interesting hack: when you get a rejection, just re-submit instantly with no changes. You probably won't get the same reviewer next time and it may pass. Obviously, this doesn't apply to substantive issues. But even there, you could re-submit immediately, then start working on the changes; who knows, you might get an approval back while you're still making the fixes.
gcheong 17y ago
"Does it make sense when iCombat Lite, having been live for 3 months with 100k installs and no complaints, suffers a 40+ day delay because it is being forced to the back of the line over and over again to wait amongst what is new crapware?" I never understand why iPhone developers seem to always think that the apps they write are so money yet apps that everyone else writes are "crapware" and are thus clogging up the app store. I agree with this author's point that you should not have to go back to the start of the queue, but that should be for all apps, and if you want a freer app store (which I do) you're going to have to put up with more "crapware" not less.
fjabre 17y ago
Sorry to hear about that.. The point was not that he used Wii as a keyword.. The point is that Apple runs its software approval process like the Soviet Union ran its government. Unfortunately game dev has to be native but I for one will never develop for the iPhone natively again.. Safari is powerful enough to handle a lot of apps which could have gone that route instead, i.e. Google Voice.. Best of luck
fjabre 17y ago
With Google Adwords I can bid on "Apple", "Wii", "Star Wars", "Microsoft", "Salesforce"...etc.. Whatever I want as long as it's relevant.. It's a keyword right? Am I missing something?
elai 17y ago
You should submit 10 apps, with minor A/B differences of one app, with minor branded editions (like pokemon pearl & pokemon diamond, a few color schemes, a few different pokemon, not much else). Statistically at least one will get through, and apple does not reject on minor variations like that (just look at iMob 100 respect points). App store reviews are like 10 pregnant women, if you start all at once, you'll get all your baby's at once. Also arguing how something is better from a user's point of view can help through minor things. For example, if they reject your craiglist app because it has craiglist as a keyword, you can argue that it would make it harder for users to search for a relevant functionality. If you really don't want to "spam" the itunes store, you can "remove from sale" all the other apps that get through and just keep the best one. Or you can leave them there, see which one does best as a testing mechanism and keep that one.
- jimboyoungblood 17y ago
  you mean like this? http://jimy.posterous.com/seriously-313 http://jimy.posterous.com/seriously-313
gord 17y ago
Could you port it to Cappuccino / Atlas - then its online.
known 17y ago
"Although Apple now encourages developers to create applications for the iPhone, the company still doesn't let any outside application access background processes. That means you have to run a program actively to take advantage of it. If you switch to a different program, all activity on the first program will stop. Apple may support third party background applications in the future." http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/iphone.htm/printable http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/iphone.htm/printable

55 points by theappfarm 17y ago

This was the state of the AppStore over a year ago and I've continued to hear the same story from various sources month over month. It's not really a surprise anymore, so it begs the question of whether or not they did research. They should complete this blog post and make it a Top 10 Reasons Why Not To Develop for the AppStore. The four bullet points are scratching the surface of many issues that compound into a one big frustration. The thing is, there is also a list of the Top 10 Reasons Why You Should Develop for the AppStore. That list forces you to swallow the crap you have to put up with well, because Apple has cured so many of the much bigger headaches.

cakesy 17y ago
Number one reason to use the App store is that it is very easy to make large piles of money.
- stanleydrew 17y ago
  Do you have any data to back this up?

mtholking 17y ago

We have also had a submission rejected because of content in the application description. Even though the binary submission was not altered, we were forced to re-upload the binary and wait an additional >2 weeks for the next round of review feedback for removing ONE sentence from the description. There should be a separate review queue for application description, the current system is incredibly inefficient.

stcredzero 17y ago
Even though the binary submission was not altered, we were forced to re-upload the binary and wait an additional >2 weeks for the next round of review feedback for removing ONE sentence from the description. This smacks of the sort of bureaucratic mediocrity which Steve Jobs should hate and have hunted down, quickly and without mercy. It's exactly the sort of big company rot that slows a big company down.
- ellyagg 17y ago
  Unfortunately, like google, apple has never been big on customer service, of which this is a sort.
  - steveklabnik 17y ago
    Really? Never been big on customer service? Every time that I (or anyone else that I know) has ever had a problem with an Apple product, they've taken swift care of the issue. They've given me a brand new iPod on the spot when an old one broke before. Apple's customer service is one of the main reasons that people buy Apple products. Not that the app queue doesn't suck, don't get me wrong.
    - blasdel 17y ago
      For consumers sure, but for bigger players their customer service is as bad as Google's. The App Store's unfriendliness is not new -- it's just the awful iTMS experience with a larger audience. Institutional hardware customers have been getting fucked on a regular basis ever since the return of Jobs.
  - yardie 17y ago
    I believe just about every newspaper, rating agency, and practically everyone else who uses an Apple product would disagree with you. I will agree with you that Apple is not big on customer service. But, when the bar is set so low, they are the tallest dwarf in the room.
gfodor 17y ago
For the sake of the rest of us, care to elaborate?

lacker 17y ago

Maybe you should just not put other companies' copyrighted game names in your keywords. It sounds like Apple is purposefully slowing you down because they consider you to be malicious.

zyb09 17y ago
What an evil devil you are putting the name of one mini-game of a mini-game collection, that shipped as a bonus to an accessory, in YOUR keywords - thereby harvesting all the hard labor done by Nintendo. Outrage! You absolutely deserve to be punished by Apple (which is obviously just doing the job your parents should have done a long time ago!)
- enntwo 17y ago
  I assume lacker's point is in reference to the use of the word "Wii" itself, which is clearly a Nintendo trademark. It is not unreasonable that Apple does not want to have an app using a recognizable trademark of another company. And if you read the article, you notice that the reason they were rejected for using Wii, is because Apple felt that it was unrelated to the app, and was used as a keyword to drive search results. (Which was not the case, but from just looking at the keywords is a reasonable response). The issue the article brings up with Apple is the overall process of such a small issue resulting in an overall 40+ day delay of release due to a poor reviewal process. The article was must less critial of the actual banning of the term "Wii".
  - zyb09 17y ago
    yeah but what's the big deal.. why don't they just relax and let people use "wii" as tag. If nintendo gets angry (which might never happen to begin with) just do a quick DELETE FROM Keyword WHERE tag='wii'. Problem solved. If they would please stop being so picky about everything. There wouldn't be so much complains about the approval process, if people were thinking its fair what Apple is doing.
credo 17y ago
It looks like Apple did the right thing here. They stopped the app from using a term copyrighted by Nintendo. They also communicated the rejection reason to the developer clearly. Ultimately, this is probably going to be a win-win for both sides. Apple does the right thing. The app description and keywords don't mislead users (and as a result of the blog post complaining about Apple, the app also gets a lot of free publicity)

brianobush 17y ago

and to add on to the dev hurdle, you must code in obj-c and have a mac. I am sure there are ways around the mac part, but limiting the target language already discourages many devs from building apps for the iphone. i myself am slowly becoming an android fan (ASE - http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/wiki/FAQ http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/wiki/FAQ)

enntwo 17y ago
You are not limited to developing native apps, in fact, even if you are comfortable in developing in Obj-C, for applications of a certain size using PhoneGap or YUI to make cross-platform WebKit based normal apps is perfectly reasonable. For apps of significant size or those with performance issues, it is not unreasonable to expect to have to use one native language, such as most game consoles do, or even Android does as pointed out in your link: "If you have performance concerns for your application, it's probably better to use the standard Android SDK (or NDK) where you'll have more control over the system." Sure you could write a huge app in ASE instead of being restricted to Java, but its not recommended. In the same way you can write a huge app in PhoneGap over Obj-C, but it is not recommended.
ruslan 17y ago
Ain't Android limiting you to Java only, while for iPhone you can develop in any language which can be compliled into ARM ELF object file and linked by ld ? Beside the UI part of course. I hate developing for iPhone too cause Obj-C is not a language, it is a piece of messy crap! It makes code look like spaghetti. I receive a great pleasure developing for Android, yet Java is far from the language of my choice though it's far better than Obj-C. PS. What disappoints me about Android is that a simple "hello world" app consumes at least 12MB of RAM because of a running copy of Java/Dalvik VM. Google has to do something about it.
- cakesy 17y ago
  No, you can program in almost any language for Android, a change that was added about 3 months ago. Objective-c is great, much better than java or c# if you ask me. Are you sure you actually program for Android, you seem to be missing quite a bit of knowledge.

jackfoxy 17y ago

Now that Verizon will have a serious marketing launch of a phone designed for Android in November, things could get interesting.

josefresco 17y ago
It's already happening, turn on your TV.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

NathanKP 17y ago

From the article: Sure Apple has its reasons, namely pushing its 85k or 100k or 250k apps commercials to prove it has the most evolved app ecosystem versus its peers. But if Apple doesn’t fix these problems soon, those numbers will begin to mean less and less, and at some point the number of apps in the App store will be about as meaningful as the number of videos uploaded to YouTube. That doesn't really make sense to me. Apple has strict quality control for the exact reason that they don't want their store to turn into YouTube. Turning down apps is how they maintain quality.

alex_c 17y ago
Turning down apps to maintain quality, I'll give you that (even though there's a lot of room to argue the specifics). Turning down bug fixes for stupid reasons, though? How does that maintain quality, if it takes over a month to push a fix to an app? Eventually devs get sick of it (especially if their apps are closer to the hobby end of the spectrum) and stop maintaining them. Can't blame them.
- NathanKP 17y ago
  I agree with you on that. It doesn't make sense to turn down an App for "stupid reasons." Its just that Apples concept of a valid reason for turning down an app is obviously much broader than most people like. However, I have to wonder if it was perhaps the other way around whether we would have people complaining about how trashy the app store was and how their decent app was buried under loads of other spammy/trashy apps. I personally think Apple is a little bit too strict, but I don't want too much lenience either.
  - alex_c 17y ago
    However, I have to wonder if it was perhaps the other way around whether we would have people complaining about how trashy the app store was and how their decent app was buried under loads of other spammy/trashy apps. Yup - that would be Facebook.

awolf 17y ago

Apple rejected the app because the developer sought to use another company's product name and game title to bolster their own sales. Seems reasonable to me- at least as far as App Store rejections go.

mrkurt 17y ago
If that's all you got out of it, you seriously need to read the article again. These flippant non-responses to Apple related problems are useless and displace actual useful contributions. As someone who enjoys useful contributions... I disapprove!
- awolf 17y ago
  Granted- apple made thier usual poor developer-relations moves that they normally do- but a rejection is still justified in this case. I'm surpirsed that the developers feel justified in making a public complaint out of this.

jimboyoungblood 17y ago

My personal favorite reason for rejection is "Your big icon doesn't match the little icon". I've gotten that twice so far.

cakesy 17y ago
I have had that too, but it is not unreasonable. The worst I have had is because I used a SIMILAR font and style to a well known tv show, in a quiz about that tv show.
- DenisM 17y ago
  Wow, that's probably the worst one I've seen so far.
hboon 17y ago
But I remember they were explicit in saying it has to be similar/same in the guidelines.

dstorrs 17y ago

The sheer arbitrariness of many Apple rejections makes it pretty clear what's going on: applications are put into a queue, a group of approval guys pop the queue, review, and either approve or reject. But they aren't given clear standards for approval, so your results vary based on the whim of whichever reviewer you get. Which suggests an interesting hack: when you get a rejection, just re-submit instantly with no changes. You probably won't get the same reviewer next time and it may pass. Obviously, this doesn't apply to substantive issues. But even there, you could re-submit immediately, then start working on the changes; who knows, you might get an approval back while you're still making the fixes.

gcheong 17y ago

"Does it make sense when iCombat Lite, having been live for 3 months with 100k installs and no complaints, suffers a 40+ day delay because it is being forced to the back of the line over and over again to wait amongst what is new crapware?" I never understand why iPhone developers seem to always think that the apps they write are so money yet apps that everyone else writes are "crapware" and are thus clogging up the app store. I agree with this author's point that you should not have to go back to the start of the queue, but that should be for all apps, and if you want a freer app store (which I do) you're going to have to put up with more "crapware" not less.

fjabre 17y ago

Sorry to hear about that.. The point was not that he used Wii as a keyword.. The point is that Apple runs its software approval process like the Soviet Union ran its government. Unfortunately game dev has to be native but I for one will never develop for the iPhone natively again.. Safari is powerful enough to handle a lot of apps which could have gone that route instead, i.e. Google Voice.. Best of luck

fjabre 17y ago

With Google Adwords I can bid on "Apple", "Wii", "Star Wars", "Microsoft", "Salesforce"...etc.. Whatever I want as long as it's relevant.. It's a keyword right? Am I missing something?

elai 17y ago

You should submit 10 apps, with minor A/B differences of one app, with minor branded editions (like pokemon pearl & pokemon diamond, a few color schemes, a few different pokemon, not much else). Statistically at least one will get through, and apple does not reject on minor variations like that (just look at iMob 100 respect points). App store reviews are like 10 pregnant women, if you start all at once, you'll get all your baby's at once. Also arguing how something is better from a user's point of view can help through minor things. For example, if they reject your craiglist app because it has craiglist as a keyword, you can argue that it would make it harder for users to search for a relevant functionality. If you really don't want to "spam" the itunes store, you can "remove from sale" all the other apps that get through and just keep the best one. Or you can leave them there, see which one does best as a testing mechanism and keep that one.

jimboyoungblood 17y ago
you mean like this? http://jimy.posterous.com/seriously-313 http://jimy.posterous.com/seriously-313

gord 17y ago

Could you port it to Cappuccino / Atlas - then its online.

known 17y ago

"Although Apple now encourages developers to create applications for the iPhone, the company still doesn't let any outside application access background processes. That means you have to run a program actively to take advantage of it. If you switch to a different program, all activity on the first program will stop. Apple may support third party background applications in the future." http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/iphone.htm/printable http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/iphone.htm/printable