

Thoughts on Designing for iPad - bjonathan
http://powazek.com/posts/2583

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mgkimsal
QUOTE

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"Apple’s App Store was a constant source of stress in the development process.
Every time another story of Apple randomly booting an app from the store came
out, the whole team quaked. The idea that we could do all this work and then
Apple could deny the app, or even keep it in limbo forever, made us second- or
third-guess every design decision. “Will this pixel hurt our chances of
getting accepted?”

Apple is killing the creativity of their developers with the uncertainty of
their App store policies. We made it through okay, thankfully, but I can only
wonder about how much more interesting the store would be if Apple had given
developers a clear list of rules, and promised to stick to it. The Fear,
Uncertainty, and Doubt people have about the App Store was entirely optional –
Apple brought it on itself, and it’s not going away."

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Totally spot on. I'm not even in the iphone/ipad development space (yet?) but
among the people I run with who are, that's a big question mark for them, and
something which is feeding in to the Android hype (rightly or wrongly).
Whether Android is a better platform for a particular need is coming second to
"there's no one to arbitrarily deny our app distribution" (assuming nothing
illegal or malicious still). Yes, that's still balanced out with 'there's more
money in the Apple ecosystem' but that might not hold true forever.

With magcloud, there's no guarantee that the next update version will be
accepted, or the next one, or whatever. Based on the reports we've read from
others, magcloud might use an icon that Apple reviewers don't like, and
magcloud v2 on the ipad might not be accepted. Insanely arbitrary, and Apple
will need to do a lot to win back the trust of devs who have defected
(assuming there's anything they ever _could_ do to win it back).

