The second high-profile iPhone app developer in a week has given up on Apple, saying “the platform is a mess” and describing the App Store as “broken”.
Last week saw
Facebook walking away from the App Store due to Apple’s role in controlling and approving software for the iPhone and iPod Touch.
Now Rogue Amoeba, creators of the Airfoil Speakers Touch apps which streams audio content from Windows or Mac computer directly to an iPhone or iPod touch, have shut down their iPhone efforts.
The reasons are documented in a
detailed post on the company’s blog which also provides an inside look at how Apple’s approval process impacts on developers.
“We wanted to ship a simple bug fix, and it took almost four months of slow replies, delays, and dithering by Apple” says Rogue Amoeba’s Paul Kafasis. “All the while our buggy, and supposedly infringing version, was still available. There’s no other word for that but ‘broken’.”
“Apple is acting as a gatekeeper, and preventing you from getting the software that developers such as ourselves are trying to provide you.”
The crux of Apple’s objection was that the Airfoil Speakers Touch app used Apple graphics and icons – specifically represent the computer from which music was being streamed, and the source application from which the stream was being sent.
However, Airfoil Speakers Touch was not generating these icons – the images were being sent by the host computer, which in turn fetches them from applications and Mac OS X itself.
“If you’re sending (audio) from an iMac with Safari as your source, it shows your iMac running Safari. If you’re sending from a MacBook Pro, it shows a MacBook Pro, and so on” Kafasis explains. “We also show the source application’s icon – Safari in the above example.”
Kafasis points out that these icons and other images “are provided by Mac OS X itself, using a public function expressly for this purpose. The system has a store of machine icons stored away in the /System directory, and matches up your computer’s model identifier with their artwork to return an icon. None of these icons are shipped in our apps.”
In the meantime, as Rogue Amoeba battled with Apple’s App Review process over the course of three rejections, “a buggy version being downloaded hundreds of times per day... the only thing Apple’s process was doing was preventing a needed bug-fix from reaching the hands of our mutual customers.”
Kafasis now sides with Joe Hewitt, the Facebook developer who created the Facebook for iPhone app, in calling for an end to Apple’s role in iPhone app approval.
“The chorus of disenchanted developers is growing and we’re adding our voices as well. Rogue Amoeba no longer has any plans for additional iPhone applications, and updates to our existing iPhone applications will likely be rare.”
“In the future, we hope that developers will be allowed to ship software without needing Apple’s approval at all, the same way we do on Mac OS X. We hope the App Store will get better, review times will be shorter, reviews will be more intelligent, and that we can all focus on making great software. Right now, however, the platform is a mess.”