Apple Extends Non-Disclosure to App Store Rejection Letters

http://www.macrumors.com/2008/09/23/apple-extends-non-disclosure-to-app-store-rejection-letters/

by joshwa • 18 years ago

65 50 18 years ago

macrumors.com

thehigherlife• 18 years ago

They sure are getting harder and harder to defend in this whole debacle.

dfranke2• 18 years ago

No kidding. In the past ~1 year, between Microsoft and Apple, Microsoft has been on significantly better behavior.

mattmaroon5• 18 years ago

It's been a lot more than 1 year. It began with the iPod DRM. It's just been smacking everyone in the face for that long.

SCVirus• 18 years ago

All companies begin to act evil after they have a certain amount of control. No exceptions, some are just slower or have greater thresholds then others (google).

mechanical_fish3• 18 years ago

If I were a soulless lawyer, I might point out that this position is entirely consistent with Apple's strategy of disallowing apps that are similar to Apple's own apps. Inevitably, some of Apple's apps have been written but aren't yet released to the public. If Apple is planning to release, say, an official accounting app for the phone, they not only have an incentive to stifle your accounting app for the phone, but they also have an incentive to avoid tipping off the market too early by publicly rejecting your accounting app for the phone.

Fortunately, I'm not a soulless lawyer, so I'm also free to point out that this argument isn't so much a defense as an explanation, to opine that this sucks, and to observe that Apple's control-freak nature has now officially gone overboard. Of course, Microsoft acted like this for years, and it didn't hurt them much, so I guess it's not surprising that a company would try it again...

mattmaroon5• 18 years ago

Microsoft didn't act like this at all. If they had, Windows would never have reached the market share it has today.

You don't have to ask Microsoft for permission to develop an app for Windows. You don't have to pay them to do so or sign an NDA. They don't have a kill switch to remove it.

They may include a free competitor in the next OS, and you can argue that that is an unfair abuse of a monopoly, but they at least allowed you to try. And Firefox's immense success shows that if your product provides enough value, you can still compete.

iamelgringo2• 18 years ago

Yeah. It seems that certain departments in Microsoft have seen the light. IronPython, IronRuby, F#, PowerShell, supporting the Apache Foundation, all the cool stuff coming out of Microsoft Research. I think that cooler heads a prevailing at times. Perhaps Ray Ozzie is finally starting to have a bit of influence on the organization. Although there is still a long way to go.

I've always been fairly OS/tech agnostic over the years. But, Apple's attitude towards openness has really turned me off the past 5-6 years.

My antipathy started for me with their attitudes towards artists and Quicktime in the late 90's early 2000's, and it has continued with the transition to OSX, the ITunes handcuffs that come with any Apple product and now the issues that developers are having creating Apps for the iPhone.

Also, can someone please tell me why OSX is one of the few existing OS's that I can't install as a client OS on top of VMWare? I can have any flavor of x86 OS that I want, but now OSX.

I love Apple's design. It's the best in the industry. OSX is really shiny and pretty and I love me some good looking Unix. But, I really dislike their attitude towards openness, users and developers.

orib2• 18 years ago

They haven't been very easy to defend for about 4 or so years now. I've been saying that although Apple's products are technically nicer than Microsoft's at the moment, I'd rather see MS in a position of dominance than Apple, just based on the way that the companies have been behaving in relatively recent history.

trickjarrett• 18 years ago

Apple is trying to apply the same control to the App store that they did for so many years to their hardware. This is the mentality which is going to cause them lots of pain. In Corporate relationships this sort of control is allowed. But when you have a marketplace you need to be more... peaceful in your control.

To the user it looks like they're defending and removing the 'bad' apps.

To the developer they're just exerting too much control and not providing for an adequate system to save the developer the trouble.

The fact is developers would have much less worry or problems with this if it were an application pre-code rather than an evaluation after coding. Thus wasting their time with no solution for how to avoid wasting the time.

lemonysnicket2• 18 years ago

what users outside of the hacker and/or tech crowd will ever know/realize that apps are being removed (or in fact being restricted in the first place)?

agree with the policy you or I may not, but let's not kid ourselves and think that the users will revort (a la facebook) -- when they have not a clue the process for this phone/OS, nor android nor the typical carrier platforms.

mtrimpe• 18 years ago

Sorry, but do you really think Vista's slow uptake is caused by actual bad user experience? It's not.

It's because every techie will adamantly proclaim that Vista sucks, even though they might have never even tried it.

As far as I'm concerned Apple is a straw on the camel's back away from me doing the same to them.

dejb• 18 years ago

I believe that free choice actually leads to a better result for consumers. If you don't agree with this position then what you have said makes sense and you are probably a good fit for Mac products.

My belief is that over time consumers will notice the lack of available applications with respect to the other available platforms.

norman• 18 years ago

Doesn't seem like this should be very enforcable...

mechanical_fish3• 18 years ago

That depends on whether you ever want to be able to write a second iPhone app after your first one is rejected.

lemonysnicket2• 18 years ago

they are sacrificing long term strategy for short term gain.

not sure what the margins are now, but for iPhone 1.0 total end-end cost of the phone was something like $284 for the $600 phone. whatever the fuzzy math here, with Apple on projection to sell 10million + phones this year, they are making an absolute killing.

and thus, to the bottom line in the short term, it's not necessary at all to appease the developers -- they quality of some apps is very very high already, and will continue to do so while both independent devs and companies are also making a killing for arguably little work (a few months) and huge roi.

the long-term is that controlling the end-end solution with an iron fist will be just one of the many restraining factors that keeps them from gaining market dominance (single carrier, no keyboard, one phone model, et. al).

too bad so sad -- their way or the high way.

axod6• 18 years ago

I disagree. I'll bet that the app store doesn't feature in their long term strategy at all. It's a temporary stop gap measure, until firstly wifi is everywhere, or at least good connectivity, and secondly, until browsers can do everything that installable apps can.

unalone4• 18 years ago

No. We're not close enough to universal wi-fi for that to make sense. Apple wants a monopoly over the mobile universe.

But, honestly, they're usually better than this. I don't know why they're acting like this. It's ridiculous.

netcan• 18 years ago

I don't think that they're knowingly sacrificing the long term.

I assume that they either don't consider apps as representing the selling point individually (hence a need to get maximum developers on board & developing) or don't think that this is harming them significantly.

quasimojo• 18 years ago

how much shit will you monkeys take?

gee i wonder how the fanbois are holding out...they cling to the faux cool of apple products like a bum clings to his malt liquor. what a quandry! now they have to make this jive with the relentless bad press apple is getting and deserves over this totalitarian horsehshit

martythemaniak• 18 years ago

Its rather ironic that this comes on the same day that Android launched with its fairly open approach.

slater• 18 years ago

What I don't understand is, why haven't all these clever people, kicked out of the app store on spurious grounds (Apple: "it kinda sorta almost looks like something we've already done or are about to unveil"), banded together to make a simple installer for their apps, something like a jailbreaking wrapper for their app: You make your "illegal" iPhone app, stuff it thru the wrapper which then creates a .dmg installer file. Users then double-click the .dmg, the wrapper searches for your iPhone, if its not jailbroken it asks you whether you want to jailbreak it (with an option to download the latest jailbreak version), then installs the app.

SapphireSun• 18 years ago

That would work... but only if you weren't making money off it. Once you start getting paid to do that, you can be sure Apple will sic their soulless lawyers on you and rend you unto hades.

binarray2000• 18 years ago

Why bother? Boycott!

Apple Extends Non-Disclosure to App Store Rejection Letters

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