iPhone developer has had enough over Apple app approvals

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Apple’s App Store boasts over 100,000 apps and more than 2 billion downloads. Despite this not all of its developers are as happy and one well-respected developer decided to call it quits.

Rogue Amoeba’s Paul Kafasis has citing his frustration with the App Store approval process as to why he has quit development of iPhone, iPhone 3G and iPhone3GS apps. According to his company blog he is throwing in the towel on iPhone app development after experiencing a three-and-a-half month app approval period.

His growing irritation with the App Store centres on an update he wanted to release for his Airfoil Speakers Touch iPhone app. The app allows users to receive audio from any Mac or Windows-based PC and the update fixed some issues with audio sync.

Despite this Apple rejected the update because it used images of Apple products in the app. The way Airfoil Speakers Touch works is that it shows you graphically what machine and application your audio is coming from on the host computer. If you are connected to an iMac running Safari, that’s what will show up in the iPhone app.

This isn’t something that Kafasis hacked together–this functionality is freely available as part of Mac OS X for developers to use. In fact, Airfoil Speakers Touch 1.0 was still in the App Store, approved by Apple, with these images.

“The only thing Apple’s process was doing was preventing a needed bug-fix from reaching the hands of our mutual customers,” said Kafasis.

In order to get the fixes to customers, Kafasis took out all of the offending images and replaced them with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) logo. If you tap on the logo, you will be taken to a page explaining why the images have been removed.

Kafasis is asking users to consider donating to the EFF. While the organization isn’t involved with his decision to place its logo in his app, “if Apple is to change, it may take such an organization to make it happen,” he said.

As a developer, Kafasis also wants users to know the frustrations they have to go through to put out software. “We wanted to ship a simple bug fix, and it took almost four months of slow replies, delays and dithering by Apple,” said Kafasis. “All the while, our buggy, and supposedly infringing version, was still available. There’s no other word for that but ‘broken.’”

This isn’t the end of the road for Kafasis. A Mac developer for 11 years, he will re-focus his efforts back to his popular Mac-based applications.

Source: cnet

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Permalink | Comments (0) | Nov 16, 2009

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