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Sep 8, 2008

Apple Too Stupid to Understand Utility of Outside-The-Box Apps

UPDATE: Apple Isn’t Stupid - They’re Just “The Man”

The problem with an application review process like the one Apple has in place is that there are humans on the reviewing end that are most likely too stupid or narrow minded to pick up on really innovative applications.

I don’t care if the reviewers are the people who built the platform and think they know what it can do like the back of their hand. They will not immediately understand the usefulness of some applications, and those applications may be game changers. Instead of being introduced to the public and living or dying by a meritocracy, they will probably get a message like this:

Dear Developer,

We’ve reviewed your application Big Five.   We have determined that this
application is of limited utility to the broad iPhone and iPod touch
user community, and will not be published to the App Store.

Sincerely,

What is Big Five?  A very useful application developed by Dirk Holtwick.  It’s an alternative web browser for the iphone that enables websites to use the native iphone APIs.  So, as a web developer if I knew that visitors where visiting through Big Five, I could offer special functionality, like integrated location using their iphone’s GPS, or accelerometer functionality, etc.  Oh, and I could do all this without ever having to know Objective C or Cocoa Touch - I could use the javascript I already know and love!

(Big Five is built on the phonegap project which I talked here about and contributed to here and here.)

It’s really a very interesting application that opens up game changing possibilities for the browsing experience!  But, alas Joe Q Reviewer has decided that this is of limited functionality to the public.

Why does apple think this application is of limited use to the public?  Here are two possible justifications (albeit bad ones) that I can think the reviewer may have.  (Oh, by the way they did not offer any of these justifications, just the short and incredibly useless message I posted above).

“Well, it is of limited use because there are no websites out there that take advantage of big5 yet.”  Huh?  The logic behind that is so incredibly stupid that I don’t know where to begin.

“This application is targetting developers more than it is targetting the public.”  It targets developers in order to provide a richer experience for end-users!  If Apple would provide phone-gap like functionality in Safari itself, then maybe we wouldn’t need Big Five, but alas they have not.

The bottom line is that the application review process is tedious, narrow minded, and broken.  I wish at the very least Apple would provide a reason or some pointers to why Big Five isn’t considered useful.  I also wonder if I should not waste any time developing phonegap enabled applications because Apple is too dense to understand the possibilities it opens up?

Viewing 18 Comments

    • ^
    • v
    I'm sure they would prefer all web browsing to go through their implementation of webkit for consistency while trying to build this platform, whether they relax this in the future is anyone's guess.

    Also, I just looked through the Big5 site, and while it is a great idea, the implementation is very messy. Go into safari, type in big5's address, put in your new url, [done], save as bookmark on desktop. Then open bookmark (back to safari again) which then pass's off the url to the big5 app.

    Honestly, it's a mess. Not sure if the one they submitted to the app store was a cleaner version, but if it was like this preview, it's not hard to see why it was rejected.

    And calling an entire company stupid for rejecting something that really has a very bad user interface, is well, kinda over the top.
    • ^
    • v
    Haha, ok I agree the headline was a bit over the top, but it just reads better than 'Some Team In Apple's Iphone App Review Department Is Too Stupid To Understand Utility of Outside-The-Box Apps".

    Regarding your points - the first few steps of that messy process is meant to be alleviated by getting approved for the app store. If Big5 were a downloadable app, all a user would have to do is 1) open the app, 2) type in the web address just like in Safari.

    You are probably right about apple censoring apps that act as another web browser for whatever reason. But, just compare that what Microsoft got in a lot of trouble for doing with Internet explorer in windows. Same exact situation.
    • ^
    • v
    The difference is that Microsoft and Internet Explorer have 90%+ of the market, at the time they were doing it, more. That was the reason they got into trouble.

    Apple has what, world wide, a few percentage of the smart phone market? Lots of competition there.

    Thanks for the polite reply :)
    • ^
    • v
    The problem with Big Five, from my perspective, is that apps would essentially be delivered to iPhones without being distributed by Apple. There are inherit security and bandwidth concerns with iPhone applications, which is the reason Apple has to review and approve iPhone apps to begin with.
    • ^
    • v
    Very true and this is what scares me the most- not that the reviewers
    are stupid but that they DO understand and are intentionally blocking
    • ^
    • v
    Apple is not dense at all.
    Apple constantly thinks outside-the-box.

    Realize that Big-Five is a web browser. This means it RUNS CODE.
    Apple's developer guidelines PROHIBIT an application from RUNNING CODE.

    Obviously it is simple that Big-Five would be denied from appearing on the App Store.

    To run Big Five, you would have to jailbreak the iPhone. Simple.
    • ^
    • v
    Wrong on every level - big5 uses exactly the same tools that every
    other app uses!
    • ^
    • v
    Based on your description of the product, I'd reject it for security reasons alone. Having watched the screencast I'd go so far as to say that anyone who expected this convoluted nightmare of uselessness to sell is either too stupid to understand the meaning of terms such as "utility" and "outside-the-box" or is suffering from pathological delusions of adequacy.

    Those "Pull My Finger" guys I can sympathize with, but really, you're throwing a very sad little rage against the machine temper tantrum over something any rational person should have not only anticipated but expected. The icon alone screams "amateur."
    • ^
    • v
    Saying Big5 is useless is similar to saying Firefox was stupid when it came out. Or, that any browser but Internet Explorer and Safari are stupid.

    Here's the big secret - Big5 uses the exact same SDK as every other app. The SDK provides a component to access websites, called WebView, that lots of apps use, including Big5. The security risk in Big5 is the same security risk that any application that accesses a web site has!
    • ^
    • v
    I'm sure apples boilerplate rejection has nothing to do with the apps rejection.

    It is pretty obvious why they would reject it; to prevent hooks from websites into the iphone; potentially malicious hooks.

    Isn't this obvious? If it is not obvious, you are disingenuous.
    • ^
    • v
    If that is the case, Apple owes it to their developers to give us that type of explanation. I think there is a chance here the reviewer or team of reviewers just didn't think outside of the box, and decided that we don't need another web browser app.

    If they really did understand the full implications of the app and denied it with a boilerplate response then it's not worth the time and effort to make a remotely innovative iphone application in my opinion.
    • ^
    • v
    As has been pointed out, this is rejected because it allows an external application to access information about the iPhone. That said, he's right that someone at Apple should have explained that rather than using the "limited utility" explanation.

    To wander a little bit afield, though, I worry about this "limited utility to the broad iPhone/iPod touch user community" sentence.

    One of the reasons for third-party developers is to address these areas that are of limited utility to some but valuable to others. For example, medical dictionaries are not of interest to "the broad iPhone/iPod touch community", though there are some who will find these invaluable. So is Apple now going to try to determine whether there really is a market for your application and decide whether or not enough people would be interested in it?
    • ^
    • v
    Yeah, good points about the impact of 'limited utility'. Your last question
    has scary implications, and if the answer is 'yes' I see the application
    pool stagnating after a certain number of iPint's and 'Pull my thumb' apps
    being released.
    • ^
    • v
    Hi, I'm the author of Big5. I think I have to clarify some technical misunderstandings.

    1 Big5 was developed on the basis of the current iPhone 3G SDK, no jailbreaking or other things at all;
    2 as a browser it uses the SDK's UIWebKit component and just public methods and delegates of it;
    3 The big5: schema startup shown in the screencast is an additional feature to bring Big5 apps to the home screen (that's the only way apart of submitting apps to the AppStore); the way this is implemented is a SDK compatible way (see SDK demo app "LaunchMe" for details)
    4 In the preferences of Big5 you can explicitly switch off functionalities to gain security and privacy
    5 Apple just doesn't allow software that does not use "interpreters that are not yet on the iphone" that means Big5 doesn't hurt the SDK agreement, because it uses the unmodified Javascript interpreter of UIWebKit

    Hope I got all the points. Thanks for your interest.
    Dirk
    • ^
    • v
    Thanks Dirk for shedding some light.
    • ^
    • v
    The web has absolutely no patience what so ever! When the iPhone 1.0 came out Apple had plans for the iPhone SDK but there was no way to release a stable product and a wide open platform in their time frame. Now, 2 months after the AppStore opens it doors people are giving Apple a hard time about denying a very small number of applications. Apple is not evil nor too Stupid to allow this application in. It is just not ready. The developer can educate Apple on the product and it may well make it back into the store some time in the future.

    Give them some time to take a breath! They are still trying to stabilize the phone and SDK when it's developers are calling into them. Opening these to web designers takes additional consideration.
    • ^
    • v
    I'm sorry but the "Apple's just not ready for them" argument doesn't float with me.

    Apple is approaching iPhone development very dogmatically; from the NDA that a developer has to agree to when they download the SDK to the generic form emails they send out when they reject an app - it all stinks of premeditation on the part of Apple.

    Apple is deciding which apps get into the store and which apps don't, without shedding any light onto why they make that decision. If they wanted to encourage someone to resubmit an app at a later date when that person has followed all of the rules laid out, put quite a bit of time and effort into developing an app on their platform and been rejected with nothing to show for it then they should explain why an app has been rejected. The mere existence of the generic rejection emails suggests that tons of apps are being rejected.
    • ^
    • v
    Apple is going to act in its own interests. And yes, that's just as evil as you acting in yours. Its a total outrage.
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