A Story of Why Devs Should Think Twice about Developing for the iPhone

This was the state of the AppStore over a year ago and I've continued to hear the same story from various sources month over month. It's not really a surprise anymore, so it begs the question of whether or not they did research. They should complete this blog post and make it a <i>Top 10 Reasons Why Not To Develop for the AppStore</i>. The four bullet points are scratching the surface of many issues that compound into a one big frustration.<p>The thing is, there is also a list of the <i>Top 10 Reasons Why You Should Develop for the AppStore</i>. That list forces you to swallow the crap you have to put up with well, because Apple has cured so many of the much bigger headaches.

Maybe you should just not put other companies' copyrighted game names in your keywords. It sounds like Apple is purposefully slowing you down because they consider you to be malicious.

Apple rejected the app because the developer sought to use another company's product name and game title to bolster their own sales.<p>Seems reasonable to me- at least as far as App Store rejections go.

The sheer arbitrariness of many Apple rejections makes it pretty clear what's going on: applications are put into a queue, a group of approval guys pop the queue, review, and either approve or reject. But they aren't given clear standards for approval, so your results vary based on the whim of whichever reviewer you get.<p>Which suggests an interesting hack: when you get a rejection, just re-submit instantly with no changes. You probably won't get the same reviewer next time and it may pass.<p>Obviously, this doesn't apply to substantive issues. But even there, you could re-submit immediately, then start working on the changes; who knows, you might get an approval back while you're still making the fixes.

We have also had a submission rejected because of content in the application description. Even though the binary submission was not altered, we were forced to re-upload the binary and wait an additional &#62;2 weeks for the next round of review feedback for removing ONE sentence from the description.<p>There should be a separate review queue for application description, the current system is incredibly inefficient.

Sorry to hear about that..<p>The point was not that he used Wii as a keyword..<p>The point is that Apple runs its software approval process like the Soviet Union ran its government.<p>Unfortunately game dev has to be native but I for one will never develop for the iPhone natively again.. Safari is powerful enough to handle a lot of apps which could have gone that route instead, i.e. Google Voice..<p>Best of luck

You should submit 10 apps, with minor A/B differences of one app, with minor branded editions (like pokemon pearl &#38; pokemon diamond, a few color schemes, a few different pokemon, not much else). Statistically at least one will get through, and apple does not reject on minor variations like that (just look at iMob 100 respect points). App store reviews are like 10 pregnant women, if you start all at once, you'll get all your baby's at once. Also arguing how something is better from a user's point of view can help through minor things. For example, if they reject your craiglist app because it has craiglist as a keyword, you can argue that it would make it harder for users to search for a relevant functionality.<p>If you really don't want to "spam" the itunes store, you can "remove from sale" all the other apps that get through and just keep the best one. Or you can leave them there, see which one does best as a testing mechanism and keep that one.

"Does it make sense when iCombat Lite, having been live for 3 months with 100k installs and no complaints, suffers a 40+ day delay because it is being forced to the back of the line over and over again to wait amongst what is new crapware?"<p>I never understand why iPhone developers seem to always think that the apps <i>they</i> write are so money yet apps that everyone else writes are "crapware" and are thus clogging up the app store. I agree with this author's point that you should not have to go back to the start of the queue, but that should be for all apps, and if you want a freer app store (which I do) you're going to have to put up with more "crapware" not less.

From the article:<p><i>Sure Apple has its reasons, namely pushing its 85k or 100k or 250k apps commercials to prove it has the most evolved app ecosystem versus its peers. But if Apple doesn’t fix these problems soon, those numbers will begin to mean less and less, and at some point the number of apps in the App store will be about as meaningful as the number of videos uploaded to YouTube.</i><p>That doesn't really make sense to me. Apple has strict quality control for the exact reason that they don't want their store to turn into YouTube. Turning down apps is how they maintain quality.

"Although Apple now encourages developers to create applications for the iPhone, the company still doesn't let any outside application access background processes. That means you have to run a program actively to take advantage of it. If you switch to a different program, all activity on the first program will stop. Apple may support third party background applications in the future."<p><a href="http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/iphone.htm/printable" rel="nofollow">http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/iphone.htm/printable</a>

My personal favorite reason for rejection is "Your big icon doesn't match the little icon". I've gotten that twice so far.

With Google Adwords I can bid on "Apple", "Wii", "Star Wars", "Microsoft", "Salesforce"...etc.. Whatever I want as long as it's relevant..<p>It's a keyword right? Am I missing something?

and to add on to the dev hurdle, you must code in obj-c and have a mac. I am sure there are ways around the mac part, but limiting the target language already discourages many devs from building apps for the iphone. i myself am slowly becoming an android fan (ASE - <a href="http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/wiki/FAQ" rel="nofollow">http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/wiki/FAQ</a>)

Now that Verizon will have a serious marketing launch of a phone designed for Android in November, things could get interesting.

Could you port it to Cappuccino / Atlas - then its online.