Jul 302009
My letter to http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html
The handling of apps in the app store is simply horrible. I am not a developer, but the constant capricous nature of the approval process, and worse the removal of applications for absurd reasons, is making me very uncomfortable about the future of the App store and of my iPhone and iPod Touches. I recently updated Instapaper, an application that stores and accesses links you’ve visited. I got a dialog that the app is now rated 17+. Where is the warning/rating for Safari? Mail? Messages? AIM? YouTube? Apple has made the rating system completely worthless to me as a user and to me as a parent. When EVERY application is marked ‘adult’ then how am I to setup my iPod touch so my son can use it reasonable safely? I can’t, so Apple loses a potential sale of an iPod in this house. The rejection of applications (like the rather famous EFF RSS reader and Eucalyptus applications) shows that the process for approval is completely broken. The 6-8 week wait for approval for UPDATES to an app does nothing but damage Apple and damage the users. I’m not a developer, but I have several friends that are. The kerfuffle over Grand Central/Google Voice has caused at least one of them to, in his words, ‘walk away.’ At least one other has stopped developing since the new “everything is only for adults’ rating system went into effect. These policies and procedures are the seed of the AppStores’ destruction. Keep it up and the cascade of others walking away will seem to completely obscure the money that’s been made so far. We will be left with an empty wasteland of fart apps and walled-garden games. And let’s go back to the EFF and Eucalyptus rejections. These rejections prove that the system is completely broken and that only the rejections that generate a lot of buzz get reviewed. Both apps were approved after the firestorm of posts and articles on the Internet, so obviously both should have been approved to begin with. The given reasons were absurd. Most apps that are rejected don’t generate that kind of buzz, so those stupid rejections are never reviewed and you have a developer sitting back trying to figure out, with no help or information from Apple whatsoever, if it’s worth trying again. And one other thing, if all these apps are rated 17+ then why the hell are you rejecting comic books for having ‘too much violence’? You know what, I’m over 17 and the only person who gets to decide what is ‘too much violence’ is me.