Wow, did Joe Hewitt provoke a trend ? We learned today that Rogue Amoeba, the long time Mac developer behind Airfoil and many others decided not to develop for the iPhone any longer.
What happened? Well 3 months ago they released an iPhone version of their popular Airfoil (it lets you stream music from your computer to your iPhone over WiFi), having a few little problems with lag they submitted an update to fix the problem, here is when it started to go badly.
Indeed, it took them 3 months to go through the approval process again because they were using “Apple-owned Graphic Symbol” like the safari icon.
Here is a statement of one of their developers:
We urge you to do two things. First, be aware that Apple is acting as a gatekeeper, and preventing you from getting the software that developers such as ourselves are trying to provide you. We wanted to ship a simple bug fix, and it took almost four months of slow replies, delays, and dithering by Apple. All the while, our buggy, and supposedly infringing version, was still available. There’s no other word for that but “broken”
Are we assisting to one of the most massive waves of protestation we’ve seen so far? Would a massive developer withdrawal influence Apple? It is indeed possible, however Joe Hewitt, the developer of the Facebook app that left the project 2 days ago doesn’t believe so:
For every dev that leaves iPhone in frustration, 1000 new ones join up. iPhone is an unstoppable train regardless of how much we complain.
Do you believe that Apple would change its ways?
[via 9to5Mac]
Well, I’m glad some folks are starting to stand up for the rest of us but it is probalby too late. Apple just gets a hall pass from their fans…one could only imagine the “solutions” to this if Microsoft were doing the same thing.
Well, while Mr. Hewitt’s departure is certainly well covered, he’s not the first to leave the platform.
As for Mr. Hewitt causing a trend, I would say that Apple is the one starting the trend by being so anal about the approval process of the AppStore.
If Apple isn’t careful, they are going to have 100,000 fart, flashlight, and sexy picture apps and be as wanted as a pimple.
While I’d like to side with devs against Apple, It’s important to take second look at Rogue Amoeba’s claims.
(According to Jeff LaMarche, the claims are largely false)
http://iphonedevelopment.blogspot.com/2009/11/rogue-amoeba.html
There is also a very strong argument on the other side of that fence by DaringFireball: http://daringfireball.net/2009/11/airfoil_touch_situation
Also, RogueAmoeba has just posted a follow-up to the situation clearifying some of the points made in LaMarche’s argument: http://www.rogueamoeba.com/utm/2009/11/13/airfoil-speakers-touch-correcting-misconceptions/
Apple has a clear problem with applications that use artwork of “any kind” that show their products. RSS Player’s develoeper, Alex Sokirynsky was just informed that their latest attempt at restoring RSS Player was rejected because an image of a Podcast show has an iPhone in it’s picture that is used in the splash screen of RSS Player. So now, the Alex has to wait another 2 weeks to a month to get his application update published.
There is protecting intellectual property, and there is over protecting intellectual property. If Apple applied AppStore policies to everything else, they would find it exceptionally difficult to sell any of their product outside of their own stores and websites and equally difficult for any accessories to ever get sold.