Will App Store rules ruin the app?
Over the life of the Apple App Store, there have been myriad stories written about it, many of them full of glowing praise and many of them conveying the problems its whimsical rules have caused.
Yes, the App Store is a phenomenon of our technical times, growing from nothing to the McDonald’s of smartphone software in an incredibly short time. Billion of apps served. A hundred thousand (at least slightly) different apps. Revenue that would be the envy of a most companies. At the same time, they have approved an app wherein you need to shake a baby to death to win the game, but failed to approve an app from Google that everyone wanted. The Apple App Store is the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of Cupertino, often showing both faces at one time.
The latest brouhaha regarding the app store concerns the developer of the Facebook app, as detailed in a MacNewsWorld story. Having achieved godlike status among his peers, he has summarily decided that the summary decisions of the App Store are ill-considered and not in his interest, so he has placed the back of his hand to his forehead, wailed appropriately, and tromped off to someplace that he will be appreciated. It must also be noted that he has a point. Apple has been capricious in the extreme when it comes to the management of the App Store, and especially the approval process. Much of what they have done leaves observers scratching their heads.
Developers are, of course, famous for serving their own esoteric interests, difficult for most people to understand. Corporations are just as famous for doggedly chasing the dollar at the expense of all else. Sometimes these interests do not coincide and the sort of dustup currently extant between Joe Hewitt and Apple is the result. The important question is, “What does all this mean for the future of the app store and app development?â€
The answer is, of course, not much. Someone will step into the small vacuum left by Hewitt’s departure and chase the app dollar dream in his stead. Apple will continue to stuff more apps into a store that already has too many, leaving the user menu-impaired, too many choices, often too much alike, making decisions difficult and searching tedious. In the end, it is all a numbers game, which is what garners the most press attention, and a celebrity game, which is why people pay attention to big developers. More than anything else, though, it is a money game and as long as millions of iPhone owners download billions of apps, we will get what we deserve.
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