iPhone Developer Asks Jobs for Help
by Eric Norwood
December 11, 2008
The creator of App store sensations Frenzic and Twitterrific reached out to Steve Jobs in an attempt to save his business.
Craig Hockenberry penned a lengthy missive to the Macintosh Messiah and posted it on his website, Furbo.org, griping about "Ringtone apps" and how they are not only cutting into his bread and butter, but threatening to wreck the App Store.
Hockenberry says that the onslaught of cheap applications - or "crapware" - is muddying up the market and making it hard for quality applications to get their proper attention.
For the most part, people purchase an app based on a couple of screenshots and customer reviews. This isn't enough and he contends that his creations are a treat to use because of significant development costs, costs that cannot be recouped under current conditions. With 10,000 apps in the iTunes store, Hockenberry describes it as a "fricken’ cat fight to get into one of the top 100 [app] spots" and foresees an even grimmer future as those numbers multiply. He seems to think that low cost apps will curb creativity in developers and force innovation out of the App Store.
It's hard to imagine Apple revamping their cash cow at the behest of a third party developer, considering the app store wrangles in a cool million each day. Fixing prices is hardly a plausible solution, so what does Hockenberry really expect?
Should "innovative" applications be given special treatment? Who gets to decide what's "crapware" and what isn't? It's almost ironic - first the mortgage industry, then the insurance companies, followed by the auto makers and now it seems that even iPhone developers are asking for a bailout.
