IPhone Dev Spends $500k on Development, Still Not Approved by Apple

http://www.macblogz.com/2008/12/17/iphone-dev-spends-500k-on-development-still-not-approved-by-apple/

by nickb • 18 years ago

35 67 18 years ago

macblogz.com

volida• 18 years ago

75 days?

tlrobinson2• 18 years ago

Half of a million dollars?!

ConradHex• 18 years ago

I'm still not sure how that's such a ginormous amount of money.

jedc• 18 years ago

For marketing and development.

My guess is that a large majority of that must have been marketing.

bprater2• 18 years ago

Check some of the marketing videos. Pretty impressive motion graphics.

tlrobinson2• 18 years ago

This seems like it will suffer the same problem as Loopt and other location aware iPhone apps: you have to open the app to update your location.

Also, the way this works is Newber gives you a special phone number that people are supposed to call, and it routes it to whatever phone you want. You can then transfer the call between phones by hitting a button in Newber. This is fine for incoming calls, but what about outgoing calls? Do they have a way to intercept outgoing calls from yours phones or something?

I did like how the dude's business card said "Professional Silhouette" though.

illumen• 18 years ago

This is horrible customer service from Apple.

jgranby3• 18 years ago

It is indeed, but it's clear from the interview that they knew how opaque and unpredictable Apple's policies are. I'm baffled as to why they went and spent so much money before they knew they'd be accepted.

rokhayakebe• 18 years ago

When they say 1/2 millie they count salaries, server costs, advertisement, VOIP costs, cost to register x thousands of phone numbers, PR (which can easily eat up 3/4 of that) and all that other stuff. I would not be surprised if two guys in a dorm room find a way to make it work for less than 1/10th.

DLWormwood2• 18 years ago

RTFA. In the interview, it's mentioned that most of the expense was in infrastructure on the company's end for handling the call switching technology. This part of the investment would probably work as is when they announce the BlackBerry and Android versions of the client app. They just chose to try and deploy on the iPhone first due to its buzz and early adopter momentum.

bprater2• 18 years ago

Interesting how they have a continuity program (monthly payments). It'll be interesting to see how they do this. Give away the app and then when you are in-app they ask for your credit card number?

notauser• 18 years ago

That's how Truphone (iPhone VOIP in/out app) works - it's a free download, and when you have used up the initial credit you have to top up with a credit card.

tocomment2• 18 years ago

Where are the rules listed by the way? I just finished my first app but I'm not sure it will be accepted.

boucher4• 18 years ago

They aren't written anywhere. At least, many of them aren't.

You can find a list of reasons in the SDK agreement in your developer.apple.com account, but you won't find listed many of the reasons that apps have been rejected, like "limited utility" or "looks too much like our implementation of coverflow" or "using too much bandwidth."

tocomment2• 18 years ago

Mine definitely has limited utility! But no less utility than ifart or whatever. I guess I'll give it a shot. It won't bias them against my future submissions, right?

mattmaroon7• 18 years ago

It's absolutely retarded to spend that kind of money developing on a platform controlled by such a capricious and arbitrary master as Apple. As soon as Android has a userbase, you'll never hear this sort of story again.

dmix2• 18 years ago

Isn't that what they said about Unix when Windows was released?

jerf• 18 years ago

Show me the Windows app that Microsoft said "You can't sell that" to the app developer.

I mean, sure, they've played games ("DOS ain't done 'till Lotus doesn't run"), but flat-out blocking something on Windows?

(If you want to cite Microsoft for something like this, you might be able to find an XBox Arcade related example.)

river_styx• 18 years ago

First sentence: right on. Second: won't happen.

mattmaroon7• 18 years ago

Time will tell. I'm pretty sure it will though. iPhone is 1 device on 1 network, Android will be dozens of devices across almost all networks. It's Mac vs. Windows all over again.

markessien2• 18 years ago

You're wrong. Android is already dead. When people talk about 'when' with a product for more than a year, the product is dead. And Google actually got a phone released with Android - what happened? Basically, they killed the excitement in their platform. The phone looked terrible.

The REAL death knoll was when I heard that all phones are not required to have all features. So if you develop a game, do you or do not use the camera feature when all the phones may not have a camera? Do you or do you not use the accelerometer?

Google may have made a good product technically, but they made mistakes, and because of those mistakes, Android is dead.

Android will become the OS of choice form phone manufacturers in Guangzhou because it's free. But the big companies will not jump on the bandwagon for quite a while. They already have their existing OSes, and the customers don't care about Android.

josefresco2• 18 years ago

Are you shitting me? I told my brother in law who drives trucks for a living (very non-geeky) about Android and 48 hours later he had hacked his HT Touch from Sprint to run a dev version of Android. He hates the baked in OS and absolutely loves Google's OS even with massive bugs (due to the hack) I told him in a year he's see dozens of phones with Android pre installed and he's already looking to ditch his months-old phone because of it.

catch23• 18 years ago

You're also wrong, how do you know what deals are coming out of big name mobile chip manufacturers like Motorola? Motorola is betting big on Android and they're releasing 20-30 devices based on Android, and most of them are not cell phones. This is according to a friend working there.

DLWormwood2• 18 years ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=403320

EDIT: This is the first social bookmarking site where I feel like I should have the ability to link the same comment as a reply to multiple messages. I don't even remember wishing for this back in my USENET days. How can the userbase of this site be so clever and intelligent, but yet seem so redundant in the posted responses?

ericb• 18 years ago

500k on development, 70 days of panic, followed by 30k on PR to pressure Apple to accept it.

aswanson• 18 years ago

Apple has drifted so far from the spirit Woz infused it with with the Apple II:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II

From the article:Wozniak's open design and the Apple II's multiple expansion slots permitted a wide variety of third-party devices to expand the capabilities of the machine.

The true engineer ethos. Let people add on, build, and convert the system to their needs.

Now it's just shove shiny expensive stuff at them and don't trust the user or developer to change anything. What a way to treat users, like children.

thomasmallen2• 18 years ago

Yep. The iPhone is a console.

iigs2• 18 years ago

Yes, and it sucks, but it has been this way for a pretty long time. Jobs was never about expandability/hackability -- the original Macintosh required a special tool to open the case, wherein you could do nothing to it as it had no user serviceable parts. I had never looked before, but it doesn't appear that it even had any socketed ICs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Macintosh-motherboard.jpg , but it did have a proper font silk screened on this board that nobody ever saw. Jobs has used engineering as a means to create the experience -- Woz used the experience as a means to create engineer{s, ing}, something that I owe my love of computers and even my nickname to. :)

That said, so long as Apple essentially has a monopoly on the smartphone experience, it behooves them to control the experience of the device (via third party applications) with an iron fist -- there's very little down side to arbitrary or even counterproductive behavior so long as the experience is maintained. Should ecosystem ever matter more than the device experience, Apple will be forced to sing a different tune, but given Nokia + MS's head start and performance since the release of the iPhone I wouldn't be hopeful.

allenbrunson2• 18 years ago

looks like the ROMs are socketed. and that's the part that you'd be most likely to want changed.

thomasmallen2• 18 years ago

Call me crazy, but I think that a solid business plan doesn't depend on the whims of a single party.

rgr• 18 years ago

All new business plans are risky. Dependencies on 3rd parties add risk, but if the potential rewards are big enough the risk is worth taking.

lux2• 18 years ago

While this is a LONG time and definitely Apple needs to improve their support of developers with at least a status message of some kind, it could be that the app is complex enough that it's taking a long time due to that complexity. Apple does review all the code and test it out, so maybe that has something to do with it.

Either way, Apple needs to start communicating! It must be awful for these guys to wait like this not knowing one way or the other, and with that much riding on it. Wow.

boucher4• 18 years ago

Thing is, Apple doesn't review code. They review applications (which isn't the same thing).

More importantly, the review process is arbitrary. There are no strict guidelines, and no strict technical analysis is performed. This is easily proven by looking at the number of apps on the store using private SDKs, and the number of cases where apps have been rejected for using private SDKs even when they do not.

lux2• 18 years ago

I didn't know that. I guess I got the impression from some peoples' comments on the web that they did... Thanks for the clarification :)

jodrellblank• 18 years ago

This title is annoying - who thinks the amount you spent on development should have any bearing at all on whether Apple approve your app?

Not me, anyway. $500k shouldn't guarantee you an approval.

kragen3• 18 years ago

I don't think that's the deal; I think the reason it's interesting is that Newber has $500k hanging in the balance, and Apple's commitment is zero. They can vaporize that $500k instantly by saying no, or slowly by never responding. This is not a good position to be in, and it dramatizes what a lot of people (investors more than hackers) have been feeling about iPhone development.

riobard• 18 years ago

Emm, Newber's logo looks similar to Ubuntu's

sireat• 18 years ago

It seems the process of getting approved by Apple is about as opaque as process of getting approved by DMOZ. At least the DMOZ had/have the excuse of being volunteer run.

AndrewWarner• 18 years ago

This is why there are more fart apps for the iPhone than working word processors. Who would spend big money on an uncertain future?

radley• 18 years ago

iNoob

IPhone Dev Spends $500k on Development, Still Not Approved by Apple

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