NGG

It seems that everywhere I look these days I see iPhone developers whining and complaining about the Apple App Store approval process. I have one question for all of you: Have you ever developed an app for a different platform? Like BREW? or Blackberry? They all have a similar process. They are all similarly tangled up in process and stupidity. Imagine having your app denied because you specified a phone ID for a carrier whose network can’t be used in the state that the company doing the approval process resides in. And you had to pay a sum of money to get that process going in the first place. Now its been denied, and you have to pay that amount again.

The truth of the matter is, it isn’t just Apple that needs to fix the process. All of them need to fix the process. None of them are overly fair. If you write something they haven’t seen before, chances are they won’t know what to do with it and you’ll get denied.

Do I think it needs to be wide open? No way. There needs to be a protection level on these devices to keep the carriers happy. Remember, these devices live on the carriers network. Apple and the others are not just protecting the end user from abusers, they are protecting their ability to sell phones through carriers as well.

Take j2me for example. You are free to do a lot of work inside of the JAVA “sandbox”. The problem is if your end user bought their phone from, say, AT&T, chances are the app will not work as designed due to the additional limitations AT&T imposed on the device. Limited device access, limited space to write your data to.

I’d like to see some changes, but I think they will need to be a better balance between the carriers needs and the consumers needs. Right now it is too heavy on the carriers needs. This is one of the reasons I think no one is truly loyal to any of the carriers. If the iPhone moves to Verizon, I suspect a ton of the AT&T base would move with it. I for one would. AT&T does not have my loyalty. As my brother-in-law says about carriers, you have to pick the lesser of all evils. I don’t think I can say that any carrier I have been with could have kept me for loyalty reasons.

With all of that said, I think the whiners and complainers should try seeing what it is like on the other sides of the fence before they push all of the blame in one place.