Facebook iPhone Dev Quits Project Over Apple Tyranny(techcrunch.com) |
Facebook iPhone Dev Quits Project Over Apple Tyranny(techcrunch.com) |
If his company was doing as good a job at protecting users as Apple had, I'd be more inclined to listen to him. The position he's taken is a purely self-interested one, asking for more developer freedom without even acknowledging the difficult challenge Apple faces, and without admitting that maybe his company could learn something from them.
I can see how that can be frustrating to put in all that work in to develop a very valuable and powerful library and with the flick of a switch Apple makes your work almost useless.
app store safe fork: http://github.com/uprise78/three20-P31
What's the difference? Were these other platforms made from inferior technology, relative to the state-of-the-art at the time? Did they have inferior marketing? Was cost-of-entry too high for most developers?
The app store approval process is one of the major differences between the iPhone and all preceding platforms. Is this just a coincidence?
If you find Apple's process unacceptable there are many (ie, all) other platforms that offer similar devices on which to distribute your work without oversight by their creators. If you want to develop for a successful platform then you'll need to learn to appreciate the traits that make it so, and while not perfect, the App Store approval process is a key factor in that success.
"however I am [ideologically] opposed to the existence of their review process."
(I wouldn't take ideology in necessarily a negative way)
What don't you like?
I believe iFart was fairly popular for a time (where popular is defined as "downloaded many times"), and it even cost money, putting a financial barrier to entry in front of potential users. Does that make iFart a well-made app though? I don't think so (though maybe you or others do).
I think the Facebook app's popularity just comes from the popularity of Facebook the service.
I never know what I'm looking at. The array of controls changes every time you move from one screen to the next, so I'm never sure where I am.
And that button up in the right hand corner, the one that usually says "News Feed?" Say I'm trying to switch to something else, but all of a sudden the selector control stops working, because the app is busy trying to prefetch stuff for some selector option I didn't plan on choosing, I just stopped on that one temporarily. Then, when the control becomes responsive again, it's impossible not to overshoot, because now it's processing a bunch of user interface events that happened while it was ignoring me.
Maybe part of the problem is that facebook itself is confusing. I don't really have any idea what the difference between "News Feed" and "Status Updates" is, and I'm not terribly interested in finding out, because the site will probably change to something else altogether in a month or two.
Yeah, I have to admit, I just don't like facebook very much either. But everybody I know is there, and it's pretty, so here we are.
(Note to self: HN is starting to get filled with the same sort of know-nothing, smart-ass comments that cause me to avoid places like TechCrunch)
I can write a FB app and have it up in a jiffy, that's just not the case with Apple. And I will be so very very surprised if Facebook censors a dictionary app.
If FB doesn't like your app they'll have it down in a jiffy too. It's not nearly so clear cut as you make out. Their review process is just reactive instead of front-loaded.
It takes more courage than I can imagine to put your golden egg on a pedestal for anyone to touch, study, steal.
Sucks for developers, sure, but at some point devs start to sound kind of greedy. In both cases, you're getting the privilege to play in a very, very market. At the very least, you should respect the risk these companies take.
[1] http://weblog.raganwald.com/2004/11/sharecropping-in-orchard...
You've omitted a word or two.
I hate walled gardens. But I really don't think they are objectively the same tune different band. You're saying they will be spanking platform devs who's apps prove detrimental...well that's pretty different from Apple. Hugely different. Hmmm, hardly in the same class.
[edited to move part to a different parent comment]
In this case, referring to the fact that Facebook doesn't exactly go out of their way to provide you with the ability to 'take your data and leave'. Can you get an easy dump of all of your comments? Your friends' contact info? Your photos?
Things get complicated with friends' data of course. Facebook has a collection of your friends phone numbers, and data access permissions and storage rights get complicated.
If I start saying an opinion like Facebook is better than X, then I think you're right.
A few weeks after we added this feature, Facebook told us if we kept doing this -- if we kept letting users import their own photos -- our API access would be terminated.
So, yeah, walled garden.