The App Store Is a Classic Example Of A Broken Business Process

This weekend NPR's "On The Media" had this sad story about a Dallas Texas newspaper owner who was willing to bite the bullet and accept Amazon's 30% offer to his content if they dropped their other requirement: their right to re-license his content to others, on any medium, for the rest of eternity, for free!

That's right; they will pay the paper 30% for each content on the kindle, but they can sell that very content in other mediums, including print, and he gets nothing. The balls on Bezos!

It's a completely separate entity from their main product lines.

Until there is financial incentive to fix it, change will be slow. This includes the emergence of serious alternatives. Serious being defined as platforms that make developers money. So far, Nokia, Palm and BB and even Android don't count (though they may in the future).

It's a broken model if you're pissing off the people who helped you obtain that billion downloads, and subsequent 30% profit/sale.

No.

Selling software downloads is not a new business, though it maybe for Apple. They had predictions for numbers of iPhones sold, and know in realtime how many developers are signing up. Even if it is unexpected growth, that's part of the problem discussed in the blog - if they had good management and processes, they could scale well.

There ought be no subjective involvement in the approval process if it's to be fair to all developers. A checklist of what to avoid doing so your app can be approved has been long called for - they are not judging apps by quality after all, but against a list of restricted points such as no-scripting, no-undocumented-API-calls and others. This list is currently secret and maybe even ill-defined which could lead to a requirement for subjective decisions - but again that's part of the problem discussed - a good process would help and make that go away.

Stop making it look like a disaster because it is not.

It's one of the crummiest areas of the whole Apple-world border, the only worse area I can think of right now is the failed launch of the new .mac/mobile me(?) last year.

It is the greatest example of what can be done in online purchase and delivery of software

Hardly. There are any number of small shareware sites where you can pay/download/use in a few minutes, and never have to deal with a problem that the developer has solved but the fix is stuck in an inscrutable service for an unpredictable amount of weeks for an unknown review process. Loads of open forums where the developers are allowed to reply to negative feedback.

Most software companies are just jealous they didn't come up with that idea first.

Maybe, maybe not - either way, utterly irrelevant.

Clear? So stop the FUD now.

I don't know if there's a common term for anti-FUD (hype doesn't quite cover it), but your post would be an example of it. Positive Blustering, perhaps?