Joe Hewitt's take on the iphone App Store | Hacker News Reader

Joe Hewitt's take on the iphone App Store

joehewitt.com

50 pointsgeeko22 comments

Besides, when I have a problem with a friend, I don't threaten to boycott our friendship until they change, so I'm not going to do that to Apple either.

Apple is not your friend. Friends are people, not organizations.

Good post otherwise. Though I do wonder if Apple is legally obligated in some way to at least show that they have made a good faith effort to review applications that they are distributing. If there was no review process and people were distributing kiddie porn apps, could Apple be held legally responsible?

Not to get into corporate personage, but corporations can still be benevolent or malevolent, friendly or hostile. I don't know if I'd call Apple friendly - they're a bit aloof to be friends - but a company like Pixar I'd readily call a friend.

"Friendly" is distinctly different from "a friend."

a company like Pixar I'd readily call a friend.

I love Pixar, but they're not my friend, and they're not your friend, for at least three reasons:

1. Pixar, like all public companies, exists for one purpose: to make a profit. In fact, they have a fiduciary responsibility to their owners to pursue this purpose and if they don't, they can be sued.

2. Pixar is an organization made up of thousands of people. It's impossible for a group that's made up of thousands of conscious and self-determinant humans to be your friend. You might as well say that North Dakota is your friend.

3. Pixar does not know who you are. They do not know your name, what kind of ice cream you like, or why you enjoy riding a bicycle built for two. And to the extent that they do have any of this knowledge, it's referred to as data and is used in pursuit of the goals described in #1.

Pixar is not your friend.

Touché.

New Jersey is my friend.

Unalone - corporations are by nature, by their charters, sociopathic entities. I'm not trying to be a hater, it's just the truth. They exist for very specific purposes, and by design they pursue the highest profit margin possible (publicly-traded companies in particular). There's a real danger in assigning human emotions or anthropomorphic qualities, it unnecessarily confuses policy issues.

Think of someone complaining about their computer or a program, "It doesn't waaaaant to! [do whatever]"

If there was no review process and people were distributing kiddie porn apps, could Apple be held legally responsible?

I'd imagine not any more than Microsoft is held liable when a crime is committed by a Windows user.

Hmm...that doesn't seem to be a fair analogy, though. It's not just that Apple is providing the OS that runs the software, they're actually distributing it. A better analogy might be Walmart allowing anyone to come into their stores and put stuff on their shelves to be sold on their behalf. I doubt that Walmart would be legally safe once drug dealers, prostitutes, and illegal arms dealers starting piling their wares in their stores.

How does Android allow it?

You could be right. The only way to be certain of removing legal liability would be to allow people to install software through other means than the app store. Having the an app store as a kind of 'premium/safe' zone makes good sense - making it compulsory is the problem.

Apple would be fine, just as a web hosting company is fine if someone puts illegal content up. They'd have to make it clear that they are not the content producer and respond quickly when a legal complaint is received but it's not as if this is uncharted legal territory.

No matter how annoyed I get, I will not stop developing for Apple's platforms or using Apple's products as long as they continue to produce the best stuff on the market.

And if all developers take this attitude, why would Apple listen to the very sort of complaints this post makes? At some point you have to stand up for yourself if you want to be heard.

This is capitalism, not Developer's Rights Day. We don't like how Apple conducts their marketplace so we're porting to other platforms while continuing to profit off the iPhone and update our apps on it.

This shit's not rocket science- Apple is evil, their platform is profitable, plan accordingly.

The problem is when you publish to the app store, you are - in essence - partnering with Apple and I'd imagine you would examine any partnership before consenting to it.

Furthermore, there are real liability issues here for Apple. To assume they blindly publish anything that comes their way puts them at pretty serious risk.

Due to the way the app store is structured, the review process is required. That said, judging for content versus judging for bad code are entirely different things and I personally don't think Apple should be incorporating content vetting into their process.

Finally, Apple should provide the ability for third parties to supply applications outside of the App Store ecosphere. I've said it before, but it makes no sense to me that the iPhone is treated any differently than a laptop when the only massive difference between the two is the 3G chip and access to the cellular network. Could you imagine your laptop locked down in that way? It wouldn't sell. So why the disconnect with the iPhone? I don't know.

"only massive difference between the two is the 3G chip and..."

http://www.teknobites.com/2009/08/24/nokia-launches-booklet-...

This has nothing to do with liability-- they take on much MORE liability by reviewing than just being an open platform. It has more to do with stopping any applications that threaten revenue in any way-- and while you could have some kind of app recall process for violaters, since there is no standard it gets even more messy. They made their bed and now they can die in it for all I care. Someday, in our rocking chairs, we'll fondly remember the "good ol days" of open software under microsoft. Phhht.

Thank goodness for android... really good devices are only now hitting the market and honestly android apps will catch up very quickly. The reality is that probably only 100 apps account for 95% of all ihpone app usage. In the long tail there are a lot more java developers out there than OjC.

HTC Hero drops in a couple weeks. Nice.

Apple's never going to get rid of the review process. Their corporate culture demands complete control of their system too much for that to ever happen. Thanks, Steve Jobs....

However, what I would like to see (and I'd love some comments on this, since I know I haven't thought it through completely) is Apple allow one to sell their app through the store, but not list it in iTunes or the App Store app. That would leave the marketing solely up to the developer, and Apple could keep their sanitized image to the public. Joe's right about apps being sandboxed, so it would be unlikely that any malware app would make it into there. As it is, if someone found an exploit right now they could simply timebomb it and submit to Apple to wait for it after they've reviewed it. So, safety isn't really a concern here. It's more of a PR issue.

Thoughts?

(P.S. Commenting at 4am is not recommended. Sorry if none of this makes any sense.)

Another alternative might be to support a sort-of "two tier" system, where users could see whether or not an app got the Apple "seal of approval" before downloading it.

The problem is that if the review process is removed, there will be NO MORE DEVELOPERS on the platform. You know why? Because spammers will overrun the store and make earning money from the store next to impossible.

Yeah, that's the same reason why nobody makes money or develops for the internet.

I really agree with the points raised in the article, but as most of the other replies state, you are entering into a business relatioship with them , so yes they do have to review what you submit - fair enough.

What I've never understood is how they intend to scale the review process. With about 50,000 apps so far, and 40 reviewers (I believe that's how many there are) already, it must be a pretty intense task. How are they going to deal with this when they're getting ten or a hundred times as many submissions as they are now? In terms of business, they have to scale and grow the App Store continuously, so obviously they just employ more reviewers, but is this a viable and logical route?

Surely at some point they'll have to stop the review process.

Good article. Sounds like he is getting annoyed that the Facebook 3.0 app is still in review after two weeks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com