Rogue Amoeba Continues The App Store Withdrawal Protest
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]