The App Store, iPhone, and You

Noel Rappin, Thursday, July 24, 2008 @ 10:31 pm

Kind of an interesting day in iPhone development land. Among the stories that crossed in front of my eyeballs today,

• The first popular application to get bounced from the App Store for cause. (The game Aurora Feint could send your contact list out over the Internet in plain text. This appears to have been more in the line of an overenthusiastic developer error than a malicious ever overlord, so hopefully they'll be able to get back in the store.)
• Update, Friday Morning Looks like Aurora Feint is back on the App Store with their update this morning. (In fact, Apple seems to have released a lot of updates overnight.) So, good for that, that's pretty close to how the process should work.
• The first open source iPhone project that I am aware of, WordPress
• The second open source iPhone project that I am aware of, Box Office
• Word that Apple is seeding a beta of the 2.1 firmware and SDK to paid developers.
• The possibility that the 2.1 SDK might lift the NDA that has prevented developers from discussing the development kit publicly.

I'm particularly excited by the release of the source code projects. So far, developing for the iPhone has resembled walking blindfold through a booby-trapped Indiana Jones cave, and seeing the source for successful projects can only help wandering developers.

Really, it's amazing that any successful software made it to the App Store launch given the limitations imposed on beta SDK development -- a tribute to some amazing developer work.

Which takes us to the murky world of Apple's NDA and the general air of mystery that Apple has placed over the entire process. The Aurora Feint team says that Apple has never contacted them over the status of their app. Some users report the app was deleted from their phones during a sync, others (like me) still have it. Many developers have posted updates to Apple with no clear idea when they will get posted to the App store. Dave Thomas posted about the trouble they are having writing iPhone SDK-related books.

I don't want this to be a rant -- the App store is full of amazing work, but for the benefit of the current developers, new developers, and the users who are coming to depend on this software platform, it's time to open up the lines of communication and let a developer community form.

agile ajax

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