Apple is not your friend. Friends are people, not organizations.
Good post otherwise. Though I do wonder if Apple is legally obligated in some way to at least show that they have made a good faith effort to review applications that they are distributing. If there was no review process and people were distributing kiddie porn apps, could Apple be held legally responsible?
a company like Pixar I'd readily call a friend.
I love Pixar, but they're not my friend, and they're not your friend, for at least three reasons:
1. Pixar, like all public companies, exists for one purpose: to make a profit. In fact, they have a fiduciary responsibility to their owners to pursue this purpose and if they don't, they can be sued.
2. Pixar is an organization made up of thousands of people. It's impossible for a group that's made up of thousands of conscious and self-determinant humans to be your friend. You might as well say that North Dakota is your friend.
3. Pixar does not know who you are. They do not know your name, what kind of ice cream you like, or why you enjoy riding a bicycle built for two. And to the extent that they do have any of this knowledge, it's referred to as data and is used in pursuit of the goals described in #1.
Pixar is not your friend.
Think of someone complaining about their computer or a program, "It doesn't waaaaant to! [do whatever]"
I'd imagine not any more than Microsoft is held liable when a crime is committed by a Windows user.
And if all developers take this attitude, why would Apple listen to the very sort of complaints this post makes? At some point you have to stand up for yourself if you want to be heard.
This shit's not rocket science- Apple is evil, their platform is profitable, plan accordingly.
Furthermore, there are real liability issues here for Apple. To assume they blindly publish anything that comes their way puts them at pretty serious risk.
Due to the way the app store is structured, the review process is required. That said, judging for content versus judging for bad code are entirely different things and I personally don't think Apple should be incorporating content vetting into their process.
Finally, Apple should provide the ability for third parties to supply applications outside of the App Store ecosphere. I've said it before, but it makes no sense to me that the iPhone is treated any differently than a laptop when the only massive difference between the two is the 3G chip and access to the cellular network. Could you imagine your laptop locked down in that way? It wouldn't sell. So why the disconnect with the iPhone? I don't know.
http://www.teknobites.com/2009/08/24/nokia-launches-booklet-...
However, what I would like to see (and I'd love some comments on this, since I know I haven't thought it through completely) is Apple allow one to sell their app through the store, but not list it in iTunes or the App Store app. That would leave the marketing solely up to the developer, and Apple could keep their sanitized image to the public. Joe's right about apps being sandboxed, so it would be unlikely that any malware app would make it into there. As it is, if someone found an exploit right now they could simply timebomb it and submit to Apple to wait for it after they've reviewed it. So, safety isn't really a concern here. It's more of a PR issue.
Thoughts?
(P.S. Commenting at 4am is not recommended. Sorry if none of this makes any sense.)
Thank goodness for android... really good devices are only now hitting the market and honestly android apps will catch up very quickly. The reality is that probably only 100 apps account for 95% of all ihpone app usage. In the long tail there are a lot more java developers out there than OjC.
HTC Hero drops in a couple weeks. Nice.
What I've never understood is how they intend to scale the review process. With about 50,000 apps so far, and 40 reviewers (I believe that's how many there are) already, it must be a pretty intense task. How are they going to deal with this when they're getting ten or a hundred times as many submissions as they are now? In terms of business, they have to scale and grow the App Store continuously, so obviously they just employ more reviewers, but is this a viable and logical route?
Surely at some point they'll have to stop the review process.
