Now Facebook’s iPhone developer criticises App Store approvals
TweetApple is facing more brickbats for its iPhone apps approvals process, this time from Facebook. Well, Facebook engineer Joe Hewitt, writing on his personal blog. He’s the man responsible for Facebook’s iPhone app, version 3.0 of which is currently in the approvals process.
“The review process needs to be eliminated completely,” he writes. “Does this sound scary to you, imagining a world in which any developer can just publish an app to your little touch screen computer without Apple’s saintly reviewers scrubbing it of all evil first? Well it shouldn’t, because there is this thing called the World Wide Web which already works that way…”
Apple has argued – most recently in a filing to the Federal Communications Commission – that its review process is necessary to catch bugs before apps go live on the App Store. However, that’s not a position Hewitt has any sympathy with.
“Apple may catch a few shallow bugs in the review process, but let’s face it, the real things they are looking for are not bugs, but violations of the terms of service. This is all about lawyers, not quality, and it shows that the model of Apple’s justice system is guilty until proven innocent. They don’t trust us, and I resent that, because the vast majority of us are trustworthy.”
In fairness to Apple, though, there are more than 100,000 registered iPhone developers, the vast majority of whom don’t have the QA and testing capabilities of Facebook. Walking the line between protecting its users from buggy apps, and working with the big web services like Facebook, is the challenge Apple is facing with its App Store.
August 26th, 2009 at 7:12 pm
You would think that with all the hoopla lately around the approval process that Apple would really ramp up resources accordingly to get the approval process 1) down to a few days or less and 2) be more open about what and why things are approved.
August 26th, 2009 at 9:47 pm
I “jailbroke” my iPhone and used apps that were not approved by the Apple review process, and I could tell a clear difference. Bugs-galore. Some would crash the iPhone, cause it to over heat, and just did not work correctly. I appreciate there being some sort of filter on the apps before they hit my phone.