The problem is that "app approval" does not scale well, for a very simple reason: it is hard. Applying guidelines like the ones Apple uses, requires a very skilled individual that is able to evaluate at the same time a set of rules in a flexible way, and really understand if the app is good for the apple store or not. You can do that if you have a team of 20. Finding 300 people doing this work very well is going to be very hard, and you need to pay more as this must be people that at the same time understand design, programming (if you read the rules thare are many that without understanding of software are hard to apply), and at the same time able to find a good balance between flexibility and severity. Not an easy task at all.
Maybe they could improve the process with the following schema:
* Instead of doing a single longer review, a few of your approval team will review the app briefly, and provide a score between 1 and 5 of "acceptability".
* If the score is 4 or 5, go forward. If the score is <= 3 send it to a more expert reviewer that will do an in depth analysis.
Optionally also discard the app if the average score is <= 1.5 if there are problems with the "load" of the experts.
Yes exactly! Could you imagine how far behind the Internet (and society) would be if any website you wanted to launch had to first be reviewed and assessed by Apple/Google/<insert other corporate entity>!
This system of app review and locked-down pay-wall systems makes commercial sense for now, but ultimately it is not scalable, doesn't provide quality and is too slow. Any system that goes against the grain of a major trend, progressing along a rapid trajectory, with rapid innovation... simply will not continue.
The point at which people realize that Google and Apple are hindering innovation, will be the point at which they will open-up, and hopefully become a free platform.
(although I'm hoping before that time, our Internet infrastructure and bandwidth will be ubiquitous enough that all phones will simply boot into a browser - it's inevitable at some near point in the future).
> Could you imagine how far behind the Internet (and society) would be if any website you wanted to launch had to first be reviewed and assessed by Apple/Google/<insert other corporate entity>
You can have now your site accessible from the iPhone without the approval from Apple. It's not about availability, it's about the convenience of selling on the regulated highly accessible market. To sell in their store you enter the contract between them and you, the same way you'd do this if you'd want to have Walmart selling your goods instead of selling them on your own on the street, and even for selling on the street you'd have to follow the local laws.
You sound as if you want to make it mandatory to jailbreak your phone. If you want to go ahead, no one is stopping you, but some people are going to want the protection of vetted apps running code on their primary communication device. It is not a coincidence that Google is going the way of Apple with a curated store. If you don't like it don't use it.
> Assessing the quality of an app is what users' ratings are for
As an app store user I disagree. User ratings in the app store are not really a useful guideline in my experience - and it often takes trying several (reasonably well rated) apps to find one that is actually usable.
For example; it took me the best part of 10 tries to find a working tourist map of a city I was visiting a few weeks ago.
The app store review process is currently broken; as you say this decision is prudish, and other review decisions are idiotic.
But I think it is generally broken too in letting too much cruft go live.
In fact, I'd happily pay a premium for a "curated" store where reviewers judged the utility of apps more strictly.
I would very much like a free-for-all to be listed in the app store at all, but then give people the ability to create "curated streams" that users can subscribe-to/filter-with. That way, no bizarre censorship or arbitrary in-or-out decisions, but users could, if they wanted, only ever have to look at the store owner's "best of breed" channel.
I agree with you, which is why I use Android. But, I see an appeal to the walled garden.
I can let my children get on the app store without worrying too much it will lead to questions I don't feel like answering at that age. I have greater confidence that getting a game for the kids won't come with overly onerous spyware. I also have a better feeling that it will generally work.
This is not the way I want to operate, but I see how it appeals to some people.
App stores should do what is good for their shareholders
Apple is trying to move from being the cool kids counter-culture creative types alternative to the PC to being the corporate acceptable alternative to the Blackberry.
A story about karmasutra apps or ifart in the WSJ could cause a CEO to change their mind about allowing users to use their iPhone on the corp network.
And of course the best way of preventing such a story is, as we all know, to make a big splash about banning such an app
The problem is the human element. If you are doing something that can in some way be construed as going against the app store guidelines, eventually you are going to get a reviewer who rejects/takes down your app. Even if other reviewers knew that your app had been around for ever, you are eventually going to run into one who doesn't, or feels it's his/her job to be as strict as possible. There is very little consistency in Apple's process because of this. The company I work for has had apps rejected for things we've done literally about a dozen times before, and we certainly knew were border line but we figured were OK because it had been allowed so many times before. But eventually we run into a reviewer who for whatever reason, rejects something that we've done tons of times before.
Overall I think Apple's process works, but the inconsistency is just ridiculous. Especially when your releases are time critical.
>Apple is trying to move from being the cool kids counter-culture creative types alternative to the PC to being the corporate acceptable alternative to the Blackberry.
A story about karmasutra apps or ifart in the WSJ could cause a CEO to change their mind about allowing users to use their iPhone on the corp network.
Only this has nothing to do with it.
iOS made inroads into the enterprise DESPITE the plethora of fart apps, Kama Sutra apps and such stuff.
Apple could care less about the hypothetical CEO you mention --not that 99.9% of CEOs would care about the presence of Kama Sutra apps in the app store when considering allowing the iPhone or not.
Mostly things like: employes and managers like to use it, it delivers a business advantage, we can deliver apps for our corporation in that platform.
"Apple could care less about the hypothetical CEO you mention"
The old fringe player Apple could - the new $trillion corporate Apple might "think different".
Remember once upon a time Microsoft was a cool fashionable young persons software company fighting against the established corporate monopolies
I'm sure this was just a new employee who was probably still in high-school when the Appstore launched and thinks anything not on the front page of reddit is ancient.
But it does show a certain attitude inside Apple. Iconoclast thinking different and "we can do no wrong" is great when it's Jobs deciding you only need one mouse button - it's different when it becomes an unwillingness to even talk to your customers and users.
>The old fringe player Apple could - the new $trillion corporate Apple might "think different".
I seriously doubt it. Especially since they became the "$trillion corporate Apple" by not caring about those things --so why change a winning strategy?
I don't agree that its a super hard job and that's why this problem has occurred.
Surely the review team should hear the iKamasutra's concerns and realise that the app has been in use for years already, and that the sudden reason to reject it is confusing and obtuse.
What you are saying boils down to "Surely it's obvious that...".
Of course, the problem there is that it's not obvious to a non-trivial number of people. Who apparently in this case work in Apple's review department.
The most obviously idiotic things often look perfectly sensible from "inside", or from a singular perspective.
But like any big organization, there are likely idiosyncrasies that have bubbled and been allowed to continue just because, "that's the way things are." For example, the whole iphone4 antenna thing was surely seen by many people...but it's likely that someone at top said, "It's passable" and everyone else on the team learned to just accept it. Just because lots of people recognize a big problem doesn't mean that all efforts have been made to rectify/smooth it out.
The Apple antenna happened because Johnny Ives and Steve Jobs loved the design look and feel of the metal around the edge of the phone, and told the engineers to make it happen. Unfortunately, this time hey couldn't bend the laws of physics. I suggest looking up "Steve's Folly"...
There was nothing wrong with the Apple antenna. It was a perception issue, not a flaw. People kept buying that phones even after Apple stopped giving away the free cases and people kept giving it a higher customer satisfaction rating than any other phone on the planet at the time...because the benefits of the new design generally outweighed the costs - it was a good design given the constraints faced at the time.
> I suggest looking up "Steve's Folly"
Which turns out to be a rant about Adobe Flash for Mobile, which even Adobe has since given up on.
"Steve Jobs’ obsession with aesthetic details could be taken to ludicrous extents. For example, when they built a state-of-the-arty factory in Fremonth to manufacture the Macintosh, Jobs wanted all the machines repainted in bright colors. Apple’s manufacturing director, Matt Carter, fought him on it, because this was precision equipment, and repainting them could make them not work right. Steve persevered, and one of the most expensive machines broke, being known as Steve’s folly."
Exactly - it was a perception issue - in that the signal strength indicator was showing 5 out of 5 bars with signal strength ranging from 60% to 100%. When you covered the antenna with your hand, the signal strength dropped ~40%. So if you were in an area with strong reception, you would get ~60%, which Apple considered so "good enough" that we might as well show Full bars. If you on the other hand were in an area with weaker reception, say 60% (which still shows as Full bars), and cover the antenna you get 60-40=20% signal strength which resulted in a lot of issues and dropped calls.
Now, about the customer satisfaction rating... did users rate the phone (calling) experience alone, or the overall experience of using a 326dpi, internet-enabled, capacitive touch screen pocket computer with 500 000 "apps" that also happens to have a GSM capability besides Wi-Fi/FaceTime/Skype-video-calling??
The iPhone is as much a music player as a phone, so every iPhone comes with a special microphone headset with some external controls in the chord. Many iPhone users (myself included) prefer to talk on the phone via this headset. Using the headset you get better sound quality for both parties, can hear with both ears, can move more freely and be more comfortable and can use the phone to take notes or check your calendar or look something up on the internet while you talk. So when you talk on an iPhone, the phone might be in your pocket or in your lap or on the desk in front of you or just about anywhere. This presumption that people who are talking on the phone must be holding the phone by its base against their head is frankly a relic of an earlier time when phones weren't also good music players.
If you're listening to music and receive a call, one squeeze to the headphone chord answers the call, then the music comes back up where it left off when you or the other party hangs up. It's really convenient.
The AT&T network was kind of crappy for a while because they had trouble keeping up with demand. This perception issue only affected people who didn't use headphones and held the phone in a certain way and had unusually poor local signal strength...but even then, it wasn't appreciably worse than the situation those same people would have faced with the prior model, the 3GS.
My iphone didn't come with this. Maybe it's because I am a business customer and had to buy it through the ATT store? I'm in the Boston area, in case that's pertinent.
The standard set looks a lot like plain white earbuds, but there's a tiny clicker thing on one of the headphone wires. In recent models that is (1) a microphone, (2) an up/down volume control, (3) a sort of generic action button - single-click to answer an incoming call or hang up an active one. When listening to music, single click is pause/resume, double-click skips to the next track, triple click backs up a track. press-and-hold gets you Siri.
iphone 4 - so I don't know what they mean by recent. No clicker thing, etc. etc.
OT: I've been stupidly downvoted for many things recently, including my observations about the exercise that kids get a few days ago (I have three boys, 11-17 y.o., coached in the town leagues for years, know a helluva lot of kids and watched them grow up, but I guess that doesn't qualify my observation or make them pertinent to such a discussion in any way...).
I've never complained about a downvote-- until now.
Somebody downvoted me because my fucking iphone 4 didn't come with a mic. I'm afraid our community is getting really fucking stupid. It's not that I care about karma, but I grieve the loss of the community.
Unfortunately, it sounds like it might be time for the iKamasutra team to have a lawyer write a letter to Apple. It seems like they have a pretty clear cut case of unfair treatment towards their app. Sometimes, a letter from a lawyer is all it takes to get things moving in the right direction.
i've always wondered how the app approval process works...I imagine there are diagnostic tools that search for suspicious behavior in the code. But how much time is spent going through the content? clearly there's not a rigorous effort to test stability. Besides crashes, I've seen games where much of the UI is just broken through bugs.
But seeing how quick they are to jump on objectionable content...is it safe tos ay that most of an app-approver's time has to be spent skimming for nudity/extreme violence/cuss words? how else could this reasonably scale?
Maybe they could improve the process with the following schema:
* Instead of doing a single longer review, a few of your approval team will review the app briefly, and provide a score between 1 and 5 of "acceptability".
* If the score is 4 or 5, go forward. If the score is <= 3 send it to a more expert reviewer that will do an in depth analysis.
Optionally also discard the app if the average score is <= 1.5 if there are problems with the "load" of the experts.