From the new App Store Review Guidelines:
If your App looks like it was cobbled together in a few days, or you’re trying to get your first practice App into the store to impress your friends, please brace yourself for rejection. We have lots of serious developers who don’t want their quality Apps to be surrounded by amateur hour.
and
We will reject Apps for any content or behavior that we believe is over the line. What line, you ask? Well, as a Supreme Court Justice once said, “I’ll know it when I see it”. And we think that you will also know it when you cross it.
Once again, this cuts to the bone of the argument. I don’t think it’s unfair for Apple to have a list of the applications produced for its platform that it believes is decent and upstanding, and which it is proud to be associated with. I just don’t think that that list should be the same as the list of all applications that can run, ever. I honestly think that even my detractors will concede this as a fair point.
I’m a supporter of jailbreaks as a way for people to break the impasse on their own, to let themselves in to the full universe of apps. But the way in for jailbreaks are through gaps in security, gaps that Apple has a duty to fix. While it is the pragmatic solution for iPhone owners today, it’s not the solution we’d all like to see.
Almost every other criticism of the App Store would fall away instantly if Apple would allow, through some other venue, a source of apps with unlimited distribution. (Ad Hoc forces explicit approval of every device up to 100 annually, and even those lucky enough to own a 500+-employee company with a DUNS number and qualify for the Enterprise program aren’t allowed to ship non-internal applications.)
The App Store’s standards aren’t really unfair for the App Store, they’re unfair for the market.
The market needs amateur hour. Amateur hour using the developer tools limits you to 99 user devices, or less than one every four days. (One every seventh day if they buy a new iPhone during that year, and god forbid they like iPads.) No one started writing perfect applications from day one. It takes time and effort, and feedback speeds up that process. What’s more, no one can derive any use or joy from your effort on your way to the magical invisible “professional enough” line. Even if we reduce the guidance to “no crap, okay”, I also have a feeling that this is not just one axis where a line can consistently be drawn, visualized and enforced in an objective manner, but I don’t know why exactly.
I know that it’s easy to stop and laugh about the big words about oppression, monopolistic abuse and freedom of speech that are thrown around. But imagine a world where the only works of art allowed are those fit for display at a certain gallery. Regardless of the quality of the works and the usually impeccable taste of the curator at that institution, I don’t think you’d regard the setup as a whole as fair to the world’s artists, or conducive to great art. And with a free market, that gallery could start narrow its focus to art that they truly think is great, art that they’d feature in TV ads, and wouldn’t have to accept this metaphor’s counterpart to fart apps out of catholic guilt.
One more point about jailbreaking. People don’t jailbreak to install apps that download pornography in the background while running your battery low and uploading your personal details. Not every stance that the App Store takes is, or will be, against “plainly wrong” apps. Jailbreaking itself isn’t so much fucking without a condom as the App Store is coitus interruptus.
“I just don’t think that that list should be the same as the list of all applications that can run, ever.”
That’s my problem with the iTunes 10 icon.
The icon itself is fine. I just worry that it’s the thin entering wedge of the iOS idiocracy into OS X.
“I honestly think that even my detractors will concede this as a fair point.”
There’s only one detractor who matters. And I don’t think Steve-o concedes it’s a fair point. Some folks are just control freaks.
By Chucky · 2010.09.09 18:02
And Steve also said “no way in hell we’re going to continue to allow Flash”.
By Jesper · 2010.09.09 18:04
Yes he did, and it’s a great day for lovingly contrived explanations that preserve His infallibility despite the reversal. My fav (so far–the day is young!) is that now it’s okay to use cross-compilers because the iPad has had a few months to establish itself with 25,000 native apps.
By n8 · 2010.09.09 21:22
This helps restore some hope for me personally. From what I could gather from Miguel de Icaza’s post, this was the fruit, at least partially, of them seeing some people with Apple and either Apple changing its mind or the engineers who understand what it’s about being able to fight the good fight. Tipping the App Store cow won’t happen overnight, either.
By Jesper · 2010.09.09 21:26
Agreed – another source is vital, necessary – and may even allow the App Store to reject a whole lot of junk they feel compelled to sell right now. In music, amateur hour has always covered the greats to be AND the second-rate, and the niche – early on there is often no way of telling the first from the second,
My problem with the App Store has always been as the sole, rather than definitive source, of Apps. Let the App Store be Tower Records, Virgin, HMV, but give room for the independents and the junky low price rubbish you’d never want in your store.
By JulesLt · 2010.09.10 00:58
There is a way to get apps on to iOS devices without using Apple’s developer tools and app store. It’s the way they originally suggested. It’s called Safari.
Admittedly, it uses an entirely different toolset, isn’t as performant, doesn’t have access to all the same APIs and so on.
On the other hand, your toolset (HTML/CSS/JS) is the universal language of everywhere. Your app will run perfectly well on Android, Blackberry, Palm, etc devices. And if you do it right, anything else with a web browser, too.
Yes, it’s rather hard to make money in that space, but this is amateur hour, right? Swings and roundabouts…
By Olly · 2010.09.10 10:29
You can do an awful lot with HTML now, certainly a lot more than you could when Steve Jobs first proposed it on stage, but there are still things you can’t do.
By Jesper · 2010.09.10 12:12