IPhone Dev Spends $500k on Development, Still Not Approved by Apple
macblogz.com
macblogz.com
I mean, sure, they've played games ("DOS ain't done 'till Lotus doesn't run"), but flat-out blocking something on Windows?
(If you want to cite Microsoft for something like this, you might be able to find an XBox Arcade related example.)
They said Windows was too restrictive and your letting a for-profit business control the platform is too risky, so users would naturally move to the open platform. But the average, mainstream user, was content with Windows because they were satisfied as long they had their Lotus 1-2-3 or Excel.
Although, that's not necessarily a bad assumption, given Apple's attitude thus far. I'm going to take a wait-and-see approach on this one.
"Gartner Q3 2008 data shows iPhone passes Windows Mobile": http://blogs.zdnet.com/cell-phones/?p=354
Whilst I understand that you're referring to North America you should consider that the iPhone is sold in a lot of other countries.
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.
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.
EDIT: This is the first social bookmarking site where I feel like I should have the ability to link the same comment as a reply to multiple messages. I don't even remember wishing for this back in my USENET days. How can the userbase of this site be so clever and intelligent, but yet seem so redundant in the posted responses?
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
Not me, anyway. $500k shouldn't guarantee you an approval.
That said, even with a 50% chance of getting blocked from the get go it can be still quite profitable, on average, to spend this kind of money on an app. I just wouldn't suggest funding development with credit cards.
Did they overspend? Probably. But that doesn't excuse Apple.
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.
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.
My guess is that a large majority of that must have been marketing.