
IPhone Dev Spends $500k on Development, Still Not Approved by Apple  - nickb
http://www.macblogz.com/2008/12/17/iphone-dev-spends-500k-on-development-still-not-approved-by-apple/
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mattmaroon
It'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.

~~~
markessien
You're wrong. Android is already dead. When people talk about 'when' with a
product for more than a year, the product is dead. And Google actually got a
phone released with Android - what happened? Basically, they killed the
excitement in their platform. The phone looked terrible.

The REAL death knoll was when I heard that all phones are not required to have
all features. So if you develop a game, do you or do not use the camera
feature when all the phones may not have a camera? Do you or do you not use
the accelerometer?

Google may have made a good product technically, but they made mistakes, and
because of those mistakes, Android is dead.

Android will become the OS of choice form phone manufacturers in Guangzhou
because it's free. But the big companies will not jump on the bandwagon for
quite a while. They already have their existing OSes, and the customers don't
care about Android.

~~~
josefresco
Are you shitting me? I told my brother in law who drives trucks for a living
(very non-geeky) about Android and 48 hours later he had hacked his HT Touch
from Sprint to run a dev version of Android. He hates the baked in OS and
absolutely loves Google's OS even with massive bugs (due to the hack) I told
him in a year he's see dozens of phones with Android pre installed and he's
already looking to ditch his months-old phone because of it.

~~~
markessien
That's not evidence, it's just a story. I could offer a better OS than most
phones, and a good percentage of people would switch. What the people like is
not 'android', it's multitouch, organisation and so on. If people really jump
on the UI bandwagon, whoever wrote the OS in the phone will make their own OS
look that way too. What does Android offer then?

Maybe I'm wrong - we'll see in a couple of years. But looking at things from
the perspective of now, Google has bungled this big time. OS Platforms are a
market with a lot of money behind it, and the mobile OS market has people with
money that can rival googles and a lot more experience.

Google can win if the people want Android. And right now, the people don't
care.

I can match your anecdote with one of my own - a geeky friend of mine wanted
to get a new phone. He liked Android, since it would be like the iPhone but
more open. He waited, and then that fugly phone came out. And a few weeks
later, Nokia came up with a phone with just as nice an interface, but with
well designed hardware. He went with Nokia.

~~~
mattmaroon
That phone has gotten pretty good reviews. It's also the first effort from a
small company. Large ones like Motorola begin enthusiastically shipping their
first models very soon.

------
aswanson
Apple has drifted so far from the spirit Woz infused it with with the 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.

~~~
iigs
Yes, 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> , 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
looks like the ROMs are socketed. and that's the part that you'd be most
likely to want changed.

~~~
iigs
You are absolutely correct. I would say that I'd rather have the RAM ICs
socketed, though, especially considering that the first Mac had a meager 128k
of it. :(

~~~
kragen
Could you piggyback RAM by soldering it on top of the existing chips, bending
out a single chip-enable pin so it alone wasn't in parallel with the existing
chips, and soldering it to a wire? I had an H89 with 64K of RAM; the last 16K
was hacked in that way.

~~~
ComputerGuru
Not without switching around the address lines, at the very least.

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illumen
This is horrible customer service from Apple.

~~~
jgranby
It 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.

~~~
DLWormwood
RTFA. 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.

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thomasmallen
Call me crazy, but I think that a solid business plan doesn't depend on the
whims of a single party.

~~~
rgr
All new business plans are risky. Dependencies on 3rd parties add risk, but if
the potential rewards are big enough the risk is worth taking.

------
AndrewWarner
This is why there are more fart apps for the iPhone than working word
processors. Who would spend big money on an uncertain future?

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tocomment
Where are the rules listed by the way? I just finished my first app but I'm
not sure it will be accepted.

~~~
boucher
They 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
Mine 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?

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tlrobinson
This 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.

------
riobard
Emm, Newber's logo looks similar to Ubuntu's

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lux
While 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
Thing 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
I didn't know that. I guess I got the impression from some peoples' comments
on the web that they did... Thanks for the clarification :)

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bprater
Interesting 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
That'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.

------
sireat
It 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.

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ericb
500k on development, 70 days of panic, followed by _30k on PR to pressure
Apple to accept it._

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jodrellblank
This 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
I 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.

------
volida
75 days?

~~~
tlrobinson
_Half of a million_ dollars?!

~~~
ConradHex
I'm still not sure how that's such a ginormous amount of money.

~~~
jgranby
Compared to the average iPhone app budget, I'd bet that it is a lot of money.

~~~
boucher
This 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
_This 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
"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
I think it's prety inexcusable that this software, or any software, might be
denied.

------
radley
iNoob

