- Steve Jobs, when he unveiled the SDK guidelines, went over the set of rules for developer restrictions on denying apps that fall under the malicious, illegal, porn, privacy, bandwidth hog and Unforeseen category.
- ‘Unforseen’ has claimed the lives of many great apps that weren’t able to make it through the app approval process (see MailWrangler)
- Countless developers have poured their time, money and effort into their app only to later find out that it was denied for ‘not providing sufficient differentiation, added functionality, or the functionality is too similar to a native iPhone app’.
- This all falls under the grey area that the iPhone dev team needs to do a better job of explaining.
- Apps are not made overnight and its not just developers who are disappointed. Think of the dreams of many who have searched out and hired a dev team to do an iPhone app to later find out their $20,000 investment was rejected for an ‘Unforseen’ reason. Sweet.
- Platform standardization is a huge step forward for mobile developers who used to have to put up with things like Windows Mobile, where your app was sitting around on some web page waiting to be found.
- But with things like Android and SkyMarket coming, the platform kings need to be responsible and respectful to the developer community who are trying to embrace the ‘openness’ that is being promoted to them.
- So, when Dan Kimerling from TechCrunch says that developers should stop ‘complaining’, he clearly is not one of the many people (not just developers) who have been disappointed thus far by the Grey area which needs to be further talked about amongst the gatekeepers. He should also pay attention to authorities like Ryan Block who are well versed and close to the topic.
tiny intepretation from TechCrunch