It ‘s been a hell of a rough week for the iPhone App Store; at least in terms of image and PR amongst the developer community. We ‘ve seen two very high profile developers abandon their development efforts for the iPhone OS platform “ first Joe Hewitt, who was previously the lead developer of Facebook ‘s iPhone app, and then Rogue Amoeba, well known and respected software publishers for Mac OS X and the iPhone.
Both have heavily criticized the App Store reviews process and cited it as a reason for turning their back on the iPhone OS platform “ and have also argued strongly for developers to be given the ability to get apps into the store without any need for Apple ‘s approval.
Here are some of the thoughts of Paul Kafasis at Rogue Amoeba on this:
In the future, we hope that developers will be allowed to ship software without needing Apple ‘s approval at all, the same way we do on Mac OS X. We hope the App Store will get better, review times will be shorter, reviews will be more intelligent, and that we can all focus on making great software. Right now, however, the platform is a mess.
The chorus of disenchanted developers is growing and we ‘re adding our voices as well. Rogue Amoeba no longer has any plans for additional iPhone applications, and updates to our existing iPhone applications will likely be rare. The iPhone platform had great promise, but that promise is not enough, so we ‘re focusing on the Mac.
Joe Hewittt also supports the idea of completely removing the need for Apple approval:
I have only one major complaint with the App Store, and I can state it quite simply: the review process needs to be eliminated completely.
As much as I find a lot of the App Store reviews process ridiculous and frustrating at times (even frequently of late), I don ‘t feel as if entirely scrapping the process is a good idea. I tend to agree with a lot of what Joshua Schnell has written on this in his recent post titled ‘The AppStore isn ‘t perfect, but it ‘s better than an open one ‘.
Here ‘s a little bit of Joshua ‘s thinking on what the review process should and should not be:
Before everyone gets their panties in a bunch, my thoughts, and subsequent rant here has nothing to do with me advocating an application gate keeper. Apple should not, under any circumstance determine whose applications get published and whose gets tossed on the scrap heap. They should however be able to vet out applications that break the device. If they can expedite their current process, and eliminate developers concerns about the time it ‘s taking to carry out that process, then I ‘m all for a closed system.
I think, as Joshua was getting at, that if Apple could restrict their review process to solely looking at the ‘soundness of the code ‘ sort of area “ that would make a lot more sense to me. In other words, keep their decisions to fairly black and white areas “ does the code risk crashing other apps / hanging up the OS?, does it compromise security? and similar. Not venturing into any of the grey areas beyond that. I think that would represent a sensible level of ‘gatekeeping ‘ for the App Store.
I have a feeling some might question the idea that I ‘m arguing in favor of vetting by Apple while being jailbroken and running jailbreak apps. That ‘s a fair question “ but I would respond that:
- I do not recommend jailbreak for all levels of users, and I consider myself an experienced and tech-savvy user.
- The %age of jailbreak apps I run is tiny in comparison to App Store apps “ considerably less than 10%. So I feel that the level of risk to the stability / security / performance of my iPhone from jailbreak apps is reduced to an acceptable level (for me) by my fairly cautious approach.
Anyway, the bottom line for me right now is that as a user I would not like to see the App Store reviews process scrapped. I would absolutely like to see it improved “ a great deal “ but not done away with completely.
What about you all? Do you think the process should be killed off entirely? Should all apps be allowed in and reported / policed / managed later on?
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TAGS: App Store reviews process
