A zombie keyboard, an app-store rejection, a call from Steve Jobs | Hacker News Reader

A zombie keyboard, an app-store rejection, a call from Steve Jobs

blog.cascadesoft.net

175 pointsharscoat65 comments

I don't get it. The summary is that the guy submitted an application, got rejected, appealed, the appeal process seemed to take too long, he emailed Jobs, Jobs phoned him and told him and "reiterated" (from the post) the app store rules until the guy decided he won't achieve anything.

I'm amazed at how Jobs telling the guy the same thing that he already knew (telling him 2 times actually) somehow made him go to a paragraph about Jobs with a well deserved opinion of quality products.

He still couldn't release the software, he got a "no go" for fixing the situation the way he could, he got absolutely no information about whether the issue will be fixed in the future or not. But that's ok, since Jobs called him? Seriously?

Humans like talking to humans.

Humans especially like talking to humans in authority. If you're going to have to play by a rule, it's good to know that the rule is real, and not an imaginary rule made up by a fifth-level bureaucrat on a whim, or because they're looking for a bribe, or because they don't understand the company policy, or because you're small fry and only big players get to break all the rules.

And humans like consistency, closure, and clear boundaries. The hardest thing is not necessarily abiding by the rules: It's trying to avoid abiding by rules that aren't really there. The easiest way to ensure that you're pushing the envelope appropriately is to press yourself right up against the edge, and the best edges to push against are the ones that are firm, so that you don't keep having to second-guess yourself, or waking up to discover that your competition is getting away with more than you are because of some uncontrollable factor.

You don't get it :)

Jobs calling a developer amounts to him gifting the dev a chance for a free and easy PR. And that's exactly what this person is doing - he tells everyone about the call and gets some eyes to look at his app. So effectively Jobs said "No, we won't let you work around our bug, but in exchange you can get a traffic bump for your app."

Yes, to be honest, I didn't think of it from the "free traffic" perspective. But I wonder how important this actually is. Sure reddit / hn / slashdot crowd will happily check that kind of news, but are those services significant in any way in the number of applications bought? I don't see how a random user from the appstore target would find that post at all. But maybe I'm wrong here?

The marketing angle on this is great. It's not big exposure for apple, but it does completely illuminate a potentially larger conversation around API's. Steve is the one guy that could stop the conversation and having him make the 5min call changes the conversation for the issue, to how hands on Apple is with the development community.

Now, there is no way that Steve has time to deal with every problem, but things that have the potential for becoming bigger conversations I definitely see him stepping in quickly. He still reviews every.. EVERY single peace of advertising about the Apple brand and approves it personally...When it comes to brand, Steve is the most hands on CEO there is.

yes and because of the slashdot/hn/reddit traffic the site gets a large boost in inbound links which will up the site ranking thereby increasing search engine visibility. It could just be a total fabrication from the developer that jobs called him though and he might be saying it to get the traffic.

This also works for Jobs. By doing so, he keeps his executives on the hop, adds to his personal brand/legend, sends a clear message to those rumoring about his health status and to the developer base that has been complaining for some time.

I definitely said "this looks like an interesting app" to myself after first clicking and going to the page describing the app and then clicking the link to itunes and then waiting for itunes to load up.

I suppose it's better than Steve Jobs not calling him.

I think the part he appreciates is that his complaint was heard, even if the resolution wasn't to his favor. His complaint could have gone into a forever-unacknowledged black hole instead. That would be far more frustrating.

I do, however, agree with you that "having a bug in the SDK and not allowing you to work around it the way they do" is not grounds for talking about how great Apple and Steve are.

He could hit an automated response telling him the same. Jobs doesn't change anything in this story apart from perception. Why would we assume that a call from Jobs means not being in an unacknowledged black hole? Did he get any new information? Any timescale for fixes? Any help?

How do we know Jobs isn't just going through the list of "put it a the end of the list and let it die" issues and randomly selecting one to respond to? Feels good, but doesn't change anything - doesn't even promise to change anything.

I get an impression that getting an answer on launchpad from Shuttleworth is pretty much equivalent to unacknowledged black hole - they've got some plan they're not going to make public and your issue will not change its status for the next 1 year (then go to invalid / not an issue / won't fix). (from past experience)

Because the author had Steve Jobs on the phone and was able to speak the issue directly to Steve's ear. It's not that complicated.

An automated response doesn't tell me that my emails haven't gone straight to /dev/null. If I'm talking to Steve, and he responds to the sentences that I'm speaking to him, then I am confident that the issue has been "heard". (Promptly ignored, perhaps, but not just black-hole'd).

Well, most people may have some idol.

Compare it to as if you find some issue in the Linux kernel, post it to Linus and he calls you back via phone, explaining why it must stay that way (or so).

Chalk it up for First Encounters of the Third Kind with the "reality distortion zone".

Seriously, a conversation can go a long way to assuage an otherwise difficult situation without actually resolving it.

He's not said to possess a reality distortion field for nothing...

I still just can't believe Jobs called the guy.

Wow!

I once emailed Steve and did not get a reply. A day later, the dude in charge of iTunesConnect called us, and then everyday till the issue was resolved, someone was emailing us daily updates.

I'm exchanged 3-4 emails with Phil Schiller back when there were some scammers on the store. Apple executive is VERY hands on.

I am really interested to know the management practices in place at Apple that enable this kind of a personal reaction to even be possible.

It simply cant be that Steve is a very conscientous person (which I'm sure he is) - but also that the infrastructure in Apple allows this.

I run a 13 people shop and I know I will get to a point where I will not be able to look at individual bugs/questions, etc. What kind of triggers, tools and techniques make it possible for an issue to be filtered up the hierarchy ?

Or is it simply because of the any-employee-can-mail-holy-Steve-but-god-help-you-if-it-was-unimportant policy?

Well, don't forget selection bias. We hear about the lucky few who hear back from Steve Jobs, but not about the hundreds that write to sjobs@apple.com and never hear back. So it could be as simple as "Steve Jobs spends 15 minutes every day on answering public emails chosen at random".

Well that would imply that Steve has at least the common decency to keep up appearances of caring about customers/partners. Like others have said this is so rare nowadays that it might as well be a black swan. And I'm talking from personal experience as customer and also as a professional who cares about users perception and who fails to understand why people keep on disrespecting people who feed them.

The case here is - that Apples contrarian play at basically everything is drawing insane dividends. And its cheap to do (Apples bottom line is proof). So if Steve is sincere in his care or not - doesn't really matter. If people around you perceive your acts as genuine - then its genuine for all intents and purposes.

It may be that Steve Jobs email account is monitored by one or more personal assistants, who act as a human filter for importance. The private API question seems important, and they could raise that issue to Jobs' priority inbox. Of course, the account is also accessible by Jobs himself which explains the responses to emails that seem unimportant.

To be slightly more cynical, they could also filter for 'Steve hasn't been in the news for a few days, let's pick a good one for him to respond to.'

Its probably the same way President Obama writes letters. Just a few chosen (either at random or someone reads all the letters and choses a few for him) letters get replies, from the hundreds of letters he gets.

I once got a call from Apple's review team from a man named Steve. This news for me is like hearing that the lotto's lucky numbers changed and I just threw away the ticket.

I did as well. It sounded exactly like Steve Jobs. At the time, I didn't know what Steve Jobs sounded like so it didn't quite click until I saw one of his keynotes. He even gave me his direct line to call him back regarding one of my apps. I called him back and left him a message. I'm half tempted to dig up my cell phone records and find the number so that I can listen to his answering-message. But I would think Steve Jobs would have a secretary answering his phone? Don't you? So maybe it wasn't him.

Can't help but to think 'What are the odds of Apple PR saw this guy was a active blogger and made it part of their agenda to call him?'.

Even if that is how it went down; the fact that its a positive for both parties makes it alright with me.

I saw "Zombie Keyboard" and thought "what useless app will they think of next?" Then I saw that wasn't what their app was and started daydreaming about how rich I'd be if my "Zombie Keyboard" app took off.

That's the sad part about the app store. The low-price expectations make creating something simple but fad-ish more appealing than making something people want because it is useful. Sigh.

I wish Steve had promised to fix the bug at some point in the future at least.

Steve is so hands-on that I wish he’d fix it personally. Maybe he’d redefine keyboard modal view class to inherit the proper UIKit methods.

I often wonder why nobody ever asks Steve if he codes when he does an interview. Maybe I should e-mail him.

Isn't it fairly well known that Steve used to code, but hasn't since like the 80s? He dabbled with it, but decided that it wasn't his strong point?

Or am I just making that up entirely? Sounds like something buried in folklore.org somewhere...

Well, he did say that he'd read all of Knuth's books...

(See http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...)

I think his technical involvement with Apple started and ended in the 70's, when he helped assemble the Apple I boards that Woz designed. I don't know if he's ever coded. I found a video once of him demonstrating NextSTEP, but it stops right before he's about to demonstrate the programming environment, so I don't know if he even demoed that part or got someone who could code to do it.

What he has done personally is some of the design; he's listed on the design patents for the glass staircase at one of the main Apple stores, and personally designed one of the glass cubes.

He has a very good dev understanding, it is more about being more useful and efficient directing the company rather than writing code. Steve made most of the major design decisions in OS X, for eg. and is a lot like billg at msft

That is certainly the impression I have. I wouldn't expect him to be writing production code anymore but I do wonder if he hacks on anything personally or if any of his kids do.

It looks like Ram sort-of capitulated. Granted it was to a request from Steve Jobs and granted he agreed to the no private API policy when he registered as an iOS developer, but it seems like he didn't get Steve to understand his point. I'm glad Steve took the time out to call him to explain (which is pretty awesome) but it seems like it was done just to get Ram to submit his app without too much fuss.

Jobs is cleverly using sample bias in Apple's favor for PR reasons here (though perhaps unintentionally). If someone emails Steve and doesn't hear back, they presumably don't write a blog post about it. Yet I suspect you're highly likely to hear about it when someone does get a reply, especially a phone call.

As a CEO you could probably make your customers think you care just by responding to .01% of emails or something like that. If all you have to do is call one guy every few weeks and tell him the same thing your underlings already told him to get this sort of coverage it's probably well worth the time.

This is not the only evidence that he cares.

or Steve Jobs is just a very good CEO

I'm not an apple fanboy but that's freakin cool.

At work I unfortunately work with some Oracle products. No way in hell would Ellison ever call me up ;)

All you need to do is stand in front of a mirror after midnight, chant 'Oracle support contract renewal' three times and he'll appear behind you.

and you stand there afraid, not knowing whether he is offering your project life or death

Both. He is the database Shiva, simultaneously creating and destroying the dreams of project managers.

I also get why you shouldn't use private APIs, but when there's a bug this big with no workaround (other than to code everything yourself, apparently) then I think it's a big mistake to reject apps over it... Unless you can promise a bugfix with a timeline.

on the other hand, what if every application using that private API call was broken by a new firmware update that fixed the bug they were trying to work around? then the users suffer and that's the whole point of rejecting applications in the first place.

Agreed. When you make an exception for developers to rely on a private method, you "promote" an implementation detail to its public interface. Now you can never remove the method, change its signature, or change its behavior. Nevermind that when the bug in the public method is fixed, you now have two methods to accomplish the same task. You've introduced cruft, or legacy code you need to maintain. Ick.

Firmware updates break/change public APIs too so that excuse doesn't work for me. Even more fun is when public APIs silently change so scanning the change log becomes useless.

Modal Form sheets are by definition supposed to keep the keyboard displayed even when there's no first responder, so I don't understand why the author thinks that's a bug. That behavior certainly is not going to change.

99% of the time when I suspect there is a bug in an underlying library, it turns out the problem is me not really understanding how that library works.

Wait, so there was a workaround (by not using a modal form), and yet we're here after a round in the app store, a call from the messiah and a blog post.

… I would replace the modal form sheet with alternative UI. Removing the form sheet (and therefore its bug) would eliminate the need for the private API.

I read that to say he went with his second choice for a user interface that is probably not quite as good and experience.

The blog post doesn't say, but I wonder if at any point the author submitted a bug report about this to whatever bug-reporting tool Apple publishes for iOS developers (assuming they have a public bug reporting tool).

They do, it’s called Radar, and if you ever see a URL beginning rdar:// it has to due with their issue tracker. (Outside devs can submit to Radar, but not read it; if you want other devs to see it, submit it to third-party-run OpenRadar as well.)

A bit OT, but I'm wondering about this sentence/typo:

> The caller-id, the caller saying “Ram, this is Steve” and that he was calling from Apple did suggest that it could really be Steve Jobs.

At first I interpreted this to mean that if you get a call from Steve or Apple that they have a custom caller ID display on any iPhone which would be kind of cool and would help validate to the receiver that it is indeed an official Steve/Apple call.

Now I realize this is probably just a typo, but I'm still wondering how the author knew that the call was actually from Apple as he implies.

Is anyone else utterly surprised that Steve Jobs actually calls developers and responds to emails? Is this a PR stunt, or is Steve genuinely interested in being that hands on? Or both?

I've read that all Apple executives are supposed to be totally hands on (which is why that bloke got fired earlier in the year, despite Apple having waited a year for his non-compete to run out)

There are quite a few instances blogged about online where Steve actually replied to someone's email or called them back about an issue.

So thanks to the guidelines that was supposed to ensure quality in the app store, his users should either deal with a buggy app, or make due without the feature?

Bummer, the middle phrase is short one syllable that would make it a 5-7-5 haiku

A zombie keyboard, one apple store rejection down, a call from Steve Jobs

A warm and fuzzy, Apple-is-greater-than-I, when Steve says "F U"

I think that they have a "most fascinating submission story among all our apps" is more a symptom of the larger problems of the App Store than anything else.

I wonder if Steve calls people who don't have a blog?

If Steve calls and there is no blog to talk about it, did Steve really call?

Steve Jobs appeared one stormy night on my father's farm and helped deliver a breach lamb. He was gone as quickly as he arrived.

Of course there's no email trail...

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