

A Story of Why Devs Should Think Twice about Developing for the iPhone - theappfarm
http://www.icombatgame.com/2009/10/19/a-story-of-why-devs-should-think-twice-about-developing-for-the-iphone/

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pxlpshr
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
Number one reason to use the App store is that it is very easy to make large
piles of money.

~~~
stanleydrew
Do you have any data to back this up?

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lacker
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.

~~~
credo
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)

~~~
cakesy
I sort of agree with you, but just because a name is trademarked (you can't
copyright a name), doesn't mean you can NEVER EVER use it. For example, Wii.
There you go.

~~~
ptomato
It does mean that there are limitations on using it in the advertising of a
competing product, however.

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awolf
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.

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mrkurt
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
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.

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dstorrs
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.

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mtholking
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
_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
Unfortunately, like google, apple has never been big on customer service, of
which this is a sort.

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steveklabnik
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.

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blasdel
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.

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fjabre
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

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elai
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
you mean like this? <http://jimy.posterous.com/seriously-313>

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gcheong
"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.

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NathanKP
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
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
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
_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.

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known
"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>

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

~~~
cakesy
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
Wow, that's probably the worst one I've seen so far.

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fjabre
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?

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brianobush
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>)

~~~
ruslan
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
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.

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ruslan
I know what JNI/NDK is, and believe me its applicability is very limited. Yes
I do develop for Android and I already ported my VoIP (Jingle Audio) library
to this platform and I also ported Speex codec using JNI and currently working
on UI part of the project I'm involved in. I did this same for iPhone and
believe from the deep of my heart that Obj-C is very crappy language comparing
even to Java. The only reason why developers use it is because Steve Jobs
personally made them to!

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

~~~
josefresco
It's already happening, turn on your TV.

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

