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user community, and will not be published to the App Store.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?