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Comment by RealCasually | Hacker News Reader

Nothing like discovering your recently released app crashes on iOS 7 and being unable to download the SDK to find out why, or fix it.

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Is that really so urgent? The majority of the people using iOS 7 are developers, understand apps will be buggy under it and wouldn't leave a bad review. I'm sure an extra few hours wait won't make too much difference :)

I don't know about that. There's a huge community of non-developers who, for reasons I cannot comprehend, love to put beta OSes on their phones. I'd wager they outnumber legitimate developers using the beta by a hefty margin. And a lot of them don't understand the implications of doing this.

Stories of unjustified bad reviews being left by users like these due to poor behavior on iOS 7 are really common in the community.

Yeah I had a flatmate who was a complete Apple fanatic and would torrent beta-versions of all their software, so he always had the cutting edge revision of OSX and iOS, even though he was not very technically inclined. He just liked having the newest and latest.

Does the App Store block reviews from beta OS users? Maybe what needs to happen is if you load a beta OS on a device, it should block reviews from any Apple IDs that were associated with that device until the OS is generally available.

After all, they do warn you that you should never install a beta OS on your daily use device and they are for development purposes only.

No, they don't, and I'm among those who have received negative reviews from people running beta releases in the past. There's absolutely nothing you can do about it (flagging a review has never had any success for me).

If you're a non-developer and running a beta OS, you should know what you're getting into.

At the same time, I do feel sorry for devs getting bad reviews because of compatibility issues. I haven't had any myself, but it's probably only a matter of time.

I'd think that Apple would prevent someone using a beta OS from ranking apps. Their disclaimer says to run it on equipment dedicated for testing. That would preclude everyday apps, and the need to leave ratings.

> There's a huge community of non-developers who, for reasons I cannot comprehend, love to put beta OSes on their phones.

I know of some affluent high-schoolers who seem to consider it prestigious if you can show off a prerelease iOS on your phone.

We've got a rendering issue on iOS7, we knew about it from the numerous non-devs who demanded a fix immediately!

Nah, being able to develop applications for the largest growing and well known ecosystem since Windows 95 is not a big deal if you live under a rock and eat grubs. In fact, I can't remember the last time software had a significant impact on the greater physical world since 0.223μs ago. Too bad mobile applications on walled garden platforms never caught on, I was hoping to witness all the fun drama and obvious security and trust implications play out inside the most complicated civilized social structure in recorded human history. But that won't happen now that Apple got bored with all the profit they get from being the new masters of the information universe and decided to shut down iTunes app store thingy.

Sorry, but what's that got to do with iOS7? Parent wasn't saying that the dev centre being down isn't a bad thing, just that iOS7 incompatibility errors aren't high on the priority list yet.

The first to market with support for iOS 7 are obviously going to have a huge advantage over other App developers. the SDK being down for every developer without access to alternative platforms for their dev stack are now put back on schedule plus the length of the outage. Again, first to market in such a large market is a huge advantage, providing social and technical momentum, making or breaking careers and enterprises for those who depend on Apple's generous returns. Entire companies can be birthed or go splat due to variables like this. It's a risk they app devs are aware of, but that doesn't mean it isn't a Big Deal.

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