I'm currently in my final 30 days of my development license contract and I'm still wondering if I should renew. I haven't had the problems a lot of people are complaining about (my apps have been accepted or rejected with a valid reason which I fixed easily).<p>It's been a fun year learning the cocoa language and getting applications out there that lots of people find useful (my most popular app was #1 on the free app store for a week within a week of it going online).<p>I'm just unsure if I should continue. I'm working on a game, but it's hard to find motivation to continue when there's so many others out there getting rejected with no reason after all their hard work. I'm still in the "it hasn't happened to me so who cares?" camp, but I could easily get burnt after spending 3 months of spare time developing.
I renewed a little while ago. I'm having a blast developing apps. I've had three in the store... lately I've been taking my time making a game. What's nice is I receive some money from Apple every month from sales of an app that I've thought about for maybe an hour over the past year. Also ad revenue from free apps is great!
I wouldn't call their app rejections <i>baseless</i>. They aren't going to approve apps that compete with the phone's built-in functionality. Period. Yeah, it stinks and yes, GV got a raw deal because Schiller apparently pre-approved the app initially. But now that these precedents have been set, any lone developer who is working on a VOIP/podcasting/digital music sales app is wasting their time IMO.<p>Even if some "big name" developers leave the scene, I don't think it will matter much. The barrier to entry for creating apps isn't that high.<p>As for the "unsustainable pricing structure" he talks about, that's partly due to the above. It's not prohibitively hard to create a simple app–therefore, any simple, successful app will have competition and the price will fall. I think it's also due to the fact most people are create B2C apps. In my opinion there's a good market for niche/vertical-focused B2B apps. The kind you can charge $10+ for and that don't require app store visibility.<p>Just my $.02