Apple: What’s Good for the Goose Ain’t Good for the Gander

A story in TechCrunch recently brought news of a prominent iPhone app developer quitting work on the project specifically because of Apple’s draconian and arcane App Store approval process:

[http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/11/joe-hewitt-developer-of-facebooks-massively-popular-iphone-app-quits-the-project/]

Joe Hewitt, developer at Facebook of its iPhone app, decided to quit the project out of frustration. “My decision to stop iPhone development has had everything to do with Apple’s policies,” he said.

Mr. Hewitt is, of course, not the first developer to quit working on iPhone projects, there are many who share his frustration, and with good reason as no one outside of Apple, Inc.- and maybe few inside- seems to be able to make any consistent sense of how and why some apps glide quickly through the approval process while others languish for weeks in limbo, or receive seemingly arbitrary rejection.

Apple’s Apps Store approval system seems to be as inconsistent and mysterious as the worst
bureaucratic administration imaginable. Apparently, it’s only the sheer popularity of the iPhone and the potential fortunes to be made that keep more developers flocking to the platform, gritting their teeth and holding their breath when approval time comes.

In a way, I feel their pain. I’m not developing for iPhone, but as a frequent customer of the App Store I often run into frustrating bureaucratic hurdles. The most frustrating is this: because of various circumstances, and being an international man of Apple usage, I have three iTunes/App Store accounts; 2 in the US store and one in the UAE store, and apps that have been purchased through all three accounts. Purchasing apps from the stores is not too much of a problem; the fact that some apps aren’t available in all stores is a bit annoying, but manageable.

What really is especially annoying is obtaining free apps, and more importantly the free updates to apps that I have already purchased. Sometimes the App Store badge will tell me that there are updates for several apps that I have installed. If I go into the App Store and press the “Update All” button I get a nightmare of repeated warnings about my account not being usable in whichever store I am logged into at the time. I end up having to switch accounts several times and retrying updates to apps one at a time until I finally get a successful download of each update.

Really? A free update to a free app being even more of a hassle than buying an app in the first place? Maddening and disgusting.

And what makes both of these issues even more annoying than they would be already is Apple’s previous history with the iTunes Music Store. Apple started the music store with fully DRM’ed downloads. They had to, the record labels would not have gone along otherwise. But they gradually worked with them to partially and then totally remove DRM from the Music Store, partly because it was a hassle to the customers but also because- probably more importantly- it was counter-productive in a wide market where the competition, both formal and casual, lacked such encumbrances.

But now in a closed market, Apple’s own little sandbox of iPhone apps, what to they do? DRM it up the wazoo! Given that the products are limited in use to their specific devices one could argue that the ‘need’ for DRM is greatly reduced. But iPhone apps are subject to end-to-end scrutiny and control from the developers’ hands to our pockets.

Suddenly Apple’s original ‘1984′ commercial railing against Big Brother seems rather hypocritical. Not necessarily the first time, but in this instance it seems worse than ever.

Forget background processes on iPhone. Give me use of apps without having to repeatedly say “Mother-may-I” to Apple.

There’s no doubt that developers would appreciate some relief from the bureaucratic tyranny as well.

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