Facebook iPhone Dev Quits Project Over Apple Tyranny | Hacker News Reader

Facebook iPhone Dev Quits Project Over Apple Tyranny

techcrunch.com

127 pointsvulpes60 comments

I find the irony of a developer working for one of the biggest walled gardens on the internet complaining about walls around someone else's garden to be very deep into the pot/kettle/black territory...

Ummm, Facebook's wall is quite a bit less ominous than Apple's. You may want to return that irony to the store, they cheated you and watered it down.

Collecting intimate personal details and selling it to advertisers is less ominous than screening apps to ensure quality?

I thought they shut down that program recently?

You're talking about Beacon, which would gather data about what you're doing on other sites.

From a developer standpoint, immensely so.

huh!? O_o

What matters here isn't "Are Apple and Facebook soulless and oppressive corporations?" (I'd argue no, lots of people would argue yes; either way it's not important.) What matters is how each is treating its developers. Facebook is open to developers and their publications; Apple isn't.

For that the key is the privacy controls. We can argue about whether Facebook's privacy controls are good enough, whether they are selling our data, and so on. But that's got nothing to do with the Apple walled-garden comparison.

I can write a FB app and have it up in a jiffy, that's just not the case with Apple. And I will be so very very surprised if Facebook censors a dictionary app.

> I can write a FB app and have it up in a jiffy, that's just not the case with Apple

If FB doesn't like your app they'll have it down in a jiffy too. It's not nearly so clear cut as you make out. Their review process is just reactive instead of front-loaded.

The walls are still there. Facebook is still a roach motel for data and now they are going to be spanking platform developers whose apps are proving to be detrimental to Facebook's reputation and user experience. Same tune, different band.

What is implied by a roach motel for data?

I hate walled gardens. But I really don't think they are objectively the same tune different band. You're saying they will be spanking platform devs who's apps prove detrimental...well that's pretty different from Apple. Hugely different. Hmmm, hardly in the same class.

[edited to move part to a different parent comment]

It's a reference to the old roach motel slogan: "Roaches check in, but they can't check out".

In this case, referring to the fact that Facebook doesn't exactly go out of their way to provide you with the ability to 'take your data and leave'. Can you get an easy dump of all of your comments? Your friends' contact info? Your photos?

Cool metaphor, I'll have to remember that.

Yes, through the API.

Almost everything in facebook is openly accessible via API if you've granted permissions to an applications to do so. We've seen services like Tweetdeck and Seesmic and Brizzly act like portals to the data.

Things get complicated with friends' data of course. Facebook has a collection of your friends phone numbers, and data access permissions and storage rights get complicated.

You work at Facebook, I know you say that on your profile, but you should probably disclose that in comments supporting them.

I disagree. Bending over backwards to recuse myself would distract from the content of the comments. I've pretty much only stated facts here anyway.

If I start saying an opinion like Facebook is better than X, then I think you're right.

I used to work for a social network that wanted to let users get their own photos out of Facebook and into our network. We built a Facebook app that expressly served this purpose; users only enabled it after knowing what it would do and desiring that consequence.

A few weeks after we added this feature, Facebook told us if we kept doing this -- if we kept letting users import their own photos -- our API access would be terminated.

So, yeah, walled garden.

What was the name of your application? When was this?

About a year ago; I'm no longer with the company. It was http://chi.mp/

It's not really surprising in either case I feel. For Facebook, their social network is their greatest value. For Apple, it's their experience.

It takes more courage than I can imagine to put your golden egg on a pedestal for anyone to touch, study, steal.

Sucks for developers, sure, but at some point devs start to sound kind of greedy. In both cases, you're getting the privilege to play in a very, very market. At the very least, you should respect the risk these companies take.

Resigning to the fact that you're a sharecropper[1] is implicit in developing on Apple platforms.

[1] http://weblog.raganwald.com/2004/11/sharecropping-in-orchard...

" In both cases, you're getting the privilege to play in a very, very market."

You've omitted a word or two.

IHNJ, IJLS spanking platform

Describe a social network with user-friendly privacy controls that doesn't fall under your definition of "walled garden".

One with a link that says "Click here to download all your data."

I know Facebook API and could make that without too much effort. Do you think the demand is there? What format would users want such data in?

they're getting closer but they're not there yet. they have an API method in beta that allows you to pull the last 50 posts of a user's mini-feed, and then you can grab comments for each post in the mini feed, but that's not going to get you all user contributions.

Agreed. It rings even more hollow given the recent revelation about widespread scams in Facebook apps.

If his company was doing as good a job at protecting users as Apple had, I'd be more inclined to listen to him. The position he's taken is a purely self-interested one, asking for more developer freedom without even acknowledging the difficult challenge Apple faces, and without admitting that maybe his company could learn something from them.

Recall that you pay nothing to use facebook, whereas with an iPhone, something that you physically own, you're not even really allowed to do as you please with it.

He's also the developer behind the three20 project which Apple has recently been rejecting apps using three20 because it was supposedly using private APIs.

I can see how that can be frustrating to put in all that work in to develop a very valuable and powerful library and with the flick of a switch Apple makes your work almost useless.

more information regarding app store rejections: http://groups.google.com/group/three20/browse_thread/thread/...

app store safe fork: http://github.com/uprise78/three20-P31

Here his announcement to the Three20 Google Group.

http://groups.google.com/group/three20/msg/9ab6b6345775dc45

If he'd like to work on a much more open app platform (where market update time is less than 24 hours) Facebook's Android app needs some love.

This is really too bad. I use Facebook via the iPhone app more than the web interface. I can't wait to see what he does next.

The iPhone app is continuing, if it sucks he can always walk over to the desk of whoever is working on it and tell them why it sucks :)

You assume he works in the office...

and that he can still walk.

Thanks for the useless remark. From what I know, Joe does a lot of work from home.

(Note to self: HN is starting to get filled with the same sort of know-nothing, smart-ass comments that cause me to avoid places like TechCrunch)

Smartphones, PDA's and other mobile-computing-platforms have been around for years (more than a decade). Almost all of them have provided third-party developers with a means of producing software for the platform. While some were more successful in this regard than others, none of them enjoyed the third-party-developer support that the iPhone now has, whether you measure that by number, quality or market share.

What's the difference? Were these other platforms made from inferior technology, relative to the state-of-the-art at the time? Did they have inferior marketing? Was cost-of-entry too high for most developers?

The app store approval process is one of the major differences between the iPhone and all preceding platforms. Is this just a coincidence?

If you find Apple's process unacceptable there are many (ie, all) other platforms that offer similar devices on which to distribute your work without oversight by their creators. If you want to develop for a successful platform then you'll need to learn to appreciate the traits that make it so, and while not perfect, the App Store approval process is a key factor in that success.

The TC boys need a sense of perspective; while the App Store review process is terrible, it doesn't come close to being "tyranny".

Came here to say the same thing. Author needs to go live somewhere where they can experience true tyranny.

Relax -- it's just a metaphor. The iTunes App Store may not be under tyranny, but that's like saying it's not an ecosystem because binaries are nothing like living creatures (nor is it a platform because it's not a flat physical object, etc. ad absurdum).

Ideology in the work place is tricky. It's something most people should be very careful about. Most of us cannot opt out of a platform/technology we dislike personally. Even if you can it may be hard to rationalize their existence when you deposit your paycheck. I hope it works out for him.

Nice, I literally read "philosophy" as "ideology" as well:

"however I am [ideologically] opposed to the existence of their review process."

(I wouldn't take ideology in necessarily a negative way)

I personally dont find the app very well made. Interesting outcome for the developer nonetheless.

It is the most popular free iphone app. That wouldn't be the case if it weren't well made.

What don't you like?

I use the facebook iPhone app quite a lot, and I don't like it either, so I'll take a stab at it.

I never know what I'm looking at. The array of controls changes every time you move from one screen to the next, so I'm never sure where I am.

And that button up in the right hand corner, the one that usually says "News Feed?" Say I'm trying to switch to something else, but all of a sudden the selector control stops working, because the app is busy trying to prefetch stuff for some selector option I didn't plan on choosing, I just stopped on that one temporarily. Then, when the control becomes responsive again, it's impossible not to overshoot, because now it's processing a bunch of user interface events that happened while it was ignoring me.

Maybe part of the problem is that facebook itself is confusing. I don't really have any idea what the difference between "News Feed" and "Status Updates" is, and I'm not terribly interested in finding out, because the site will probably change to something else altogether in a month or two.

Yeah, I have to admit, I just don't like facebook very much either. But everybody I know is there, and it's pretty, so here we are.

> It is the most popular free iphone app. That wouldn't be the case if it weren't well made.

I believe iFart was fairly popular for a time (where popular is defined as "downloaded many times"), and it even cost money, putting a financial barrier to entry in front of potential users. Does that make iFart a well-made app though? I don't think so (though maybe you or others do).

I think the Facebook app's popularity just comes from the popularity of Facebook the service.

As far as farting simulation applications go, iFart was top notch.

There is a tremendous gulf between popularity and quality. If you'd like an illustration, go turn on a radio.

Aside from obvious quality benefits, the review process is a good thing because it results in users having more trust in apps developed by relatively unknown developers/companies.

I'm not sure all of us see the quality benefits quite so obviously. Are you implying that dictionaries with censored words are better quality?

I challenge you to find a popular dicionary that isn't carefully curated. You can't just call up Webster and get a word added to the dictionary, there's a vetting process it has to go through.

Curated != Censored.

Apple having a repository of approved apps is fine. Denying the ability to run other apps isn't.

Maybe he just burnt-out and wants to move on to something else?

crybaby

I can't believe that it's been a year and Apple still has the weird ass review process!

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