He may be right. But he's not adding any value for anyone the way he points it out. I think the biggest problem I have with it is that he's insulting and attacking the people who made these apps. There is no reason for that.
It's a curious community we have. Pointing out problems or reporting visceral reaction is considered not constructive. Yet speculative re-designs to illustrate what the critic might have done differently are also considered not constructive.
It seems to me that when nothing short of actually competing against a product is considered useful or valid, the real argument is that criticism shouldn't exist and isn't useful in and of itself.
This line from HN guidelines illustrate my point:
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
I know that showing "attitude" and being cool is all the rage these days, but I still thinking politeness works like a charm.
There's more than one way to show attitude, and politeness is one of them. It's an affectation, no different from RTFHIG's all-lowercase ironic outrage.
You can narrow your argument to just "can't we all just be polite" and have a nice, if naive, point. But I disagree that the core complaints in the article or this thread are restricted to, or even primarily about, the tone.
1. If you're going to create, you need a thick skin for rejection and criticism, constructive or otherwise.
2. Everyone has a certain amount of shitty work that they need to work out of their system before they get good. If nobody tells them their crap work is crappy, they'll probably keep making it like that and won't improve.
3. Even successful novelists can get to a point where they stop being edited, and their work from that point tends to be flabby, overlong, and not well-regarded compared to earlier work that actually was edited.
But that's a good point. The hideous Apps in the App Store are like the terrible self-published things that shows up in the Kindle store.
The point of the blog, from what I can tell, is to make people laugh. Let's lighten up.
Honestly, if I had an app in the store and it was featured here (with a handy backlink) I'd probably send him a thank you note for the free advertising and feedback.
I spent so much time on this web interface, 'Shopping my brains out. The result was, for the time, amazing. People, who didn't have to use the site on a day-to-day basis, gushed.
Then I happened across an absolutely brutal, brutal review by some random on the net. At first I was crushed, but soon I realised that, though coarse, they had made good points and I became a better designer because of it.
Not all time needs to be spent on productive endeavors. And maybe he just might increase the quality of these apps by shaming them into compliance. The devs might even read the HIG!
I think the bigger point here is that he's complaining about something which may not even be relevant any more. As John Gruber wrote recently, the HIG is dead and Apple is what killed it.
And, to some extent, has probably created some pressure on advertisers to not do that, because they'll be mocked.
Maybe you don't find it valuable for you. But clearly you found it interesting enough to stop and make a comment when so many other articles on "more valuable" subjects sit uncommented.