Apple's App Store Review Guidelines Offer Remarkably Candid View of App Store Philosophy

[vjl323]

..and here was me thinking consistent UI was a good thing....

There is a Hotmail app for iPad that was even a Staff Favorite and it looks *identical* to Mail.app. Seriously. The icons even look identical! For all those of us who want to develop a more powerful e.mail program, we were stunned that Apple approved and even highlighted the app!

The program is called mBoxMail for iPad. The only real visible difference in the app's UI are the mailbox icons on the left - they are color instead of monochrome. The file/delete/reply/compose icons on the top right are identical!

 

[MacTheSpoon]

Ew. This is really creepy. It's like you, the developer, are there to service Apple's needs, like you're some kind of independent contractor doing work on Apple's behalf. Apple doesn't need any more fart apps? I thought the consumer decided what apps they need, and Apple provided a marketplace.

Definitely a window into Steve's mentality... and not in a good way.

 

[WestonHarvey1]

Why should I be forced to only be limited to kid safe apps cause some other person can't figure out a way to use parental controls (or, maybe pay attention to what their kid is using their computer for... the horrors! They might actually have to do work! Gee... maybe they should have used birth control if they weren't prepared for the responsibility).

Have you seen the content guidelines? "Kid safe" basically means no pornography, prolonged explicit depictions of torture or gore, no libelous or racist/inflammatory content. That still leaves quite a wide expanse of possibilities for apps.

This is a *store* people, and Apple is the retailer. They don't want to sell certain things. You won't find any of the above at Best Buy or Amazon either.

 

[vjl323]

- "We have over 250,000 apps in the App Store. We don't need any more Fart apps."

That sets an incredibly poor precedent. What happens when that becomes "We don't need another note-taking app, there's already a dozen", even when the new app offers a different interface that users may prefer?

This is the kind of stuff that happens when you can't install your own applications. It's Apple's idea that "You do have choices. You can choose from our preselected options A, B, and C" that becomes the problem. And attitudes like that (even if I agree with the uselessness of fart apps) will drive developers away in droves once they see their colleague's useful applications get rejected on those same grounds.

"We're not accepting any more video player apps, we already have 10". Yea ok Steve, watch as innovation within your app market stagnates.

I was thinking the same thing. While I agree with the "don't need more fart apps", who's to say that others won't agree with that but agree that there are too many note taking apps or video player apps. The "too many" is subjective. I'm still looking for the perfect handwriting app for iPad and though I think I found one that is 99% there [no password protection on notes one creates with it is cause for the not 100% mark], there are dozens of such apps for iPad. I don't want Apple to stop approving those apps simply because they think the market is saturated. Nearly all these apps have a different UIs that will appeal to different people.

The market seems to point out what is good and bad anyway via ratings. If an app gets a ton of bad ratings, it shows up lower in the search results. It may still be a good app for someone [unless it pulls a SimpleNote and deletes all the user's data upon updating!], but for the majority of the people, this will help them sort through the noise and find the signal. Similar to search engines - the top hits on the first few pages are, generally, better than hits found on the last few pages.

/vjl/

 

[Brometheus]

It's still PR crap, just better PR crap. If they are so worried about fart apps, give us mechanisms to point out which apps are crap and which are the best in a category or purpose.
The problem with most corporations view of free market is they focus on being able to put whatever you want in the market and see who buys it. To counter this, the answer isn't less stuff brought to market, it's better feedback and recommendations powered by users.

User feedback works well up to a point. There are way too many clueless users who have no idea how to provide useful feedback and who cannot write a short, coherent paragraph to save their lives.

 

[travishill]

This is a *store* people, and Apple is the retailer. They don't want to sell certain things. You won't find any of the above at Best Buy or Amazon either.

I agree with that to a point, but since it is *the only* store you are allowed to shop at, the comparison doesn't really work. You can normally go to another store that *does* sell the things that you want when you can't find them at one given place...so it magnifies any particular restrictions since shopping elsewhere is not a practical option for most on these devices.

 

[WestonHarvey1]

I was thinking the same thing. While I agree with the "don't need more fart apps", who's to say that others won't agree with that but agree that there are too many note taking apps or video player apps. The "too many" is subjective. I'm still looking for the perfect handwriting app for iPad and though I think I found one that is 99% there [no password protection on notes one creates with it is cause for the not 100% mark], there are dozens of such apps for iPad. I don't want Apple to stop approving those apps simply because they think the market is saturated. Nearly all these apps have a different UIs that will appeal to different people.

This is all theoretical. Apple could do a lot of things, but some aren't very likely. I don't think we have to worry about professionally done note taking apps or other apps being rejected simply because there's many other choices in that space.

What Apple is taking aim at is the flood of crapware and me-too apps. There's a difference between too many choices in the productivity app space and too many choices in the flashlight app space.

 

[smetvid]

Isn't the #1 source for porn the internet? If so how is Apple going to block that? Kids are going to surf for free porn images and video long before they would pay for a porn app with their parents account information. I mean how many kids are buying into pay porn websites?

Anyway...

I do agree about the amount of useless apps put there. Yes there are 250,000 apps which Apple gladly uses for marketing but IMO only about 250 of them are actually useful. (Exaggeration of course but you get my point) I think there was an impulse to create an app for any stupid concept people could think of. I think that may be dying down a bit and especially with the iPad I only see serious developers and serious apps being worked on now. Most iPhone apps I wouldn't even consider apps but more like novelty gag gifts you would buy at Spencer Gifts in the wall. The sort of gifts that give people a laugh for five minutes and then it is never used again.

Maybe there should be two app stores. A gag store and a real app store.

 

[NickK1066]

This is fantastic, I absolutely agree with their rules on duplicate Apps. Parental controls, not so much, but how many flashlights do we really need? (Only one, thanks to HandyLight)

Hmm where as I agree with the statements in practice. I just feel the lack of professionalism may be due to the new head of the Appstore.. perhaps he doesn't want his fart app to have any rivals..

Just because one company has produced an application to provide in-car navigation or VoIP calls that it blocks all new applications that provide that (or more functionality) is rediculous and a change in the user's T&C.
In short a better way would, perhaps be that the search system and tagging of applications in the app store in relation to the type of features that are provided would allow users to search easier (or exclude).

All evalutions are subjective. After all one man's fart-driven revenue stream is another man's annoyance.

Having one application for each possible feature will signal the death of the app store. After all having competition in a closed environment is a legal requirement? The user may choose to participate in the environment but is now locked in based on a change of terms and conditions.. Although this is an extreme example it demonstrates the issue.

Apple need to think very very carefully about that comment. It will probably earn them a second legal ruling to protect the subscriber and changes to service T&C resulting in a financial loss.

As I said - it seems that the display of professionalism is severely lacking.

 

[WestonHarvey1]

I agree with that to a point, but since it is *the only* store you are allowed to shop at, the comparison doesn't really work. You can normally go to another store that *does* sell the things that you want when you can't find them at one given place...so it magnifies any particular restrictions since shopping elsewhere is not a practical option for most on these devices.

I agree with you, but not having an alternative is really a separate complaint. It just makes the situation more exacerbating for some devs and users.

Unless and until someone can make a compelling anti-trust argument (in the US at least), that's not likely to change. And right now, I don't think there is one, since there are credible competitive platforms like Android.

 

[cmaier]

Feedback is important but filters are still necessary. As a random example, who would seriously justify the availabililty of a 'Pop-This-Zit' application?

If someone wants to buy it, then it's existence is justified. If no one wants to buy it, what's the harm?

 

[WestonHarvey1]

Isn't the #1 source for porn the internet? If so how is Apple going to block that? Kids are going to surf for free porn images and video long before they would pay for a porn app with their parents account information. I mean how many kids are buying into pay porn websites?

They don't care about what you do on the web because it isn't their responsibility. They don't provide that content. For the same reason they won't prevent you from sexting or using FaceTime for video phone sex. Or from writing a pornographic novel in Pages.

They don't want to be involved in the creation, sale, or distribution of certain types of content.

 

[kntgsp]

Have you seen the content guidelines? "Kid safe" basically means no pornography, prolonged explicit depictions of torture or gore, no libelous or racist/inflammatory content. That still leaves quite a wide expanse of possibilities for apps.

This is a *store* people, and Apple is the retailer. They don't want to sell certain things. You won't find any of the above at Best Buy or Amazon either.

It wouldn't be an issue if we could install applications that Apple doesn't want to host themselves. But they remove that option as well (unless you jailbreak). I'm perfectly fine with Apple curating ITS app store however it feels appropriate. But their policy is one of "you can't look at any store but ours". And that's where I think they go too far.

As long as they retain their mostly laissez-faire attitude towards jailbreaking (the patches that break jailbreaking usually do so because they fix a security exploit that allowed the jailbreak - PDF etc)

 

[WestonHarvey1]

If someone wants to buy it, then it's existence is justified. If no one wants to buy it, what's the harm?

The harm is to the store and the app developer ecosystem, and ultimately the brand itself.

Right now, it is very difficult to justify developing for the iPhone. The situation we have now resembles the video game crash of 1983, when the market was flooded with low quality games. The quality ones couldn't stand out. That was turned around with licensing and other strategies.

App development is extremely high risk. There are a lot of great apps out there that haven't made a penny for the developer. If you're not in the top 100 in your category, you're not going to recover your development costs. If you're not in the top 500, you will simply never be paid a penny. If you go the iAd route, you'll get more downloads, but unless you get over 1,000 a day, you probably won't see $1 a day out of it.

Most of the 250,000 apps are duds. Kicking out the crap is a good start to turning things around.

 

[Thunderhawks]

While your canned "tow the line" response will undoubtedly earn you endless fellation from the users who flocked here in the last few years, it completely misses the point.

iOS would be irrelevant in the current market without developers, regardless of whether it was the initial spur that sent the smartphone market moving in the current direction. Steve Balmer may be a raving madman, but his "developers" rant rings true. If the response to innovation is to stifle it because "we already have 5 picture viewing apps", it will send developers to other platforms. That is not something Apple wants.

Any platform, regardless how high the walls of its "walled garden", will incur an influx of "iFart", "Miley Cyrus ringtonezomg", etc. developers. As long as the arbitrary "have too many" rule is applied to trash apps, no one will care. The second they start applying it en masse to more useful apps, it has a good chance of shifting some development to other platforms. The problem is both one of the rules being too arbitrary, and simultaneously that defining what makes an app "too similar" would incur thousands of pages of documentation. So the result is that the developers and consumers simply have to trust Apple to be a benevolent dictatorship.

It is not a dig at Apple as a computer company or a platform. Your precious foundation upon which your entire social standing is apparently based has not been wounded. It is simply a comment about how they treat development with regards to a specific subset of their company, namely iOS.

Haha,

"entire social standing based on not being wounded". Do you have any other platitudes? How about "It is what it is?"

Fact is that Apple decides, not you or the developers and Apple has done pretty well with their guidelines, policies and business model.

As an Apple user since 1984 , I have lived through their duds, policies and don't agree with everything they do.

It just so happens that I don't like any other computers or iOS.
Their stuff has always worked for me hassle free.

It is actually good IMO to force developers of apps of the same type to come up with new and different ideas.

In that sense Apple is OPEN, just not for what they deem bad for consumer experience.

 

[cmaier]

The harm is to the store and the app developer ecosystem, and ultimately the brand itself.

Right now, it is very difficult to justify developing for the iPhone. The situation we have now resembles the video game crash of 1983, when the market was flooded with low quality games. The quality ones couldn't stand out. That was turned around with licensing and other strategies.

App development is extremely high risk. There are a lot of great apps out there that haven't made a penny for the developer. If you're not in the top 100 in your category, you're not going to recover your development costs. If you're not in the top 500, you will simply never be paid a penny. If you go the iAd route, you'll get more downloads, but unless you get over 1,000 a day, you probably won't see $1 a day out of it.

Most of the 250,000 apps are duds. Kicking out the crap is a good start to turning things around.

Nonsense. People aren't going to confuse the quality stuff with fart apps. And even if Apple got rid of all the "crap" you'd still have 100,000 apps left - it won't materially change how hard it is for a particular developer to be noticed. Most developers (me included) would prefer Apple not "curate" the appstore. They have rejected things for political reasons, not just for being distasteful. Unless you are a developer yourself, why don't you let us defend ourselves. (By the way, I'm not in the top 100 in any category I develop in, yet I've more than recouped my development costs).

 

[mags631]

Apple has always been like this, or I should really say that Steve Jobs has always been like this. Back in the late 1980s a lot of Macintosh users used to say, "Mac is the computer we love to use, in spite of the company that makes it."

I've been a Macintosh user since the late 80s -- and I never heard someone saying this. Apple was pretty cool to deal with in the 80s and gave terrific discounts to schools and colleges.

 

[goinskiing]

- "We have over 250,000 apps in the App Store. We don't need any more Fart apps."

That sets an incredibly poor precedent. What happens when that becomes "We don't need another note-taking app, there's already a dozen", even when the new app offers a different interface that users may prefer?

This is the kind of stuff that happens when you can't install your own applications. It's Apple's idea that "You do have choices. You can choose from our preselected options A, B, and C" that becomes the problem. And attitudes like that (even if I agree with the uselessness of fart apps) will drive developers away in droves once they see their colleague's useful applications get rejected on those same grounds.

"We're not accepting any more video player apps, we already have 10". Yea ok Steve, watch as innovation within your app market stagnates.

But that was not their argument however, note taking apps and video players are useful, they're just saying that they don't need hundreds of useless apps such as fart apps. I think this is quite refreshing and I am glad to see they're moving in the direction of more transparency.

 

[BWThorp]

This is fantastic, I absolutely agree with their rules on duplicate Apps. Parental controls, not so much, but how many flashlights do we really need? (Only one, thanks to HandyLight)

I disagree. If someone comes up with an app to do "X", does that mean that someone who has a better implementation is prohibited from submitting their app because it copies the first one's functionality? I say bull. Let the users determine which app should belong based on the number of downloads.

 

[goinskiing]

The harm is to the store and the app developer ecosystem, and ultimately the brand itself.

Right now, it is very difficult to justify developing for the iPhone. The situation we have now resembles the video game crash of 1983, when the market was flooded with low quality games. The quality ones couldn't stand out. That was turned around with licensing and other strategies.

App development is extremely high risk. There are a lot of great apps out there that haven't made a penny for the developer. If you're not in the top 100 in your category, you're not going to recover your development costs. If you're not in the top 500, you will simply never be paid a penny. If you go the iAd route, you'll get more downloads, but unless you get over 1,000 a day, you probably won't see $1 a day out of it.

Most of the 250,000 apps are duds. Kicking out the crap is a good start to turning things around.

Completely disagree. Developing for the iPhone is probably one of the best developing opportunities out there in the mobile industry, just play by the rules and make a quality app and it will treat you nicely back. The golden rule of app store development.

 

[kingtj]

NOTHING old about it, from my perspective!

I *did* "go buy a Droid". In fact, I bought 2 different ones. I'm using the new Kyocera Zio at the moment, because I really like the "no contract" rate plan offered by Cricket Wireless with it right now. ($55 per month gets you unlimited talk, SMS/MMS and Internet usage)

Fact is though? Apple has the "user experience" thing down to an extent very FEW others can attain! The Android OS compared to the iPhone's OS? Laughable! I don't know WHO all these Droid fanatics are who keep bashing Apple, but they're WAY out in left field.....

1. We have a web proxy server at my workplace (as many workplace environments do). On the iPhone, using it was no problem at all. Simply tap the blue "right arrow" icon next to the wi-fi SSID when it shows up, and configure the option to use it via a proxy. On the Andoid phones? No matter WHICH version of their OS I tried (1.6, 2.1 or 2.2), there's no way to do this! It simply doesn't support proxies over wi-fi right now!

2. Largely because apps aren't "regulated' like Apple chooses to do with their online store, you have to worry much more about unknown apps you install on an Android phone. Just like Windows, people are starting to run anti-virus packages on the things now! And for all the Droid owners who keep bashing the iPhone because "you have to jailbreak it just to use some of the software apps you want to use!" ... I say "HUH?!?" The Android requires hacking it for "root" access before you can use most of the popular wi-fi tethering apps out for it, and the "Wireshark" packet sniffer I saw for it required root access too. Unlike the iPhone though, rooting a Droid isn't always as simple as running someone's 1-click program! Different phones have custom firmwares because of differing cameras, screens, and other hardware in all of them -- so a script utility designed to "root" some of the phones will error out on others.

3. So many BASIC functions on an Android phone are a pain to do vs. the iPhone's methods! Want to re-arrange your icons on a screen? The iPhone is intuitive. Hold down one of them until they all start jiggling back and forth, and drag one wherever you want it. The others will slide out of its way accordingly! On Android? No way! You have to delete an icon just to free up room to put another one in its old location, and if the screen is full already, you simply can't add anything else there anymore! Want to actually REMOVE the app itself? On the iPhone, again, it's as easy as tapping the little "X" in the corner when the icons are jiggling. On Android? Hah! You have to navigate through the Preferences menus to a screen where everything's listed out, and select one to remove it, and click an uninstall button!

Oh, and thanks to Apple's "control freak behavior" over look and feel of the OS, everyone can easily use ANY iPhone of any version once they learn one of them. On Android? You never know WHAT kind of UI changes you're going to get! "Motoblur"? Maybe... maybe not. Custom tabs or alternate home screens? Who knows... whatever a phone vendor felt like doing to it is what you've got, out of the box! Apple = win again, here.

Go buy a droid, Personally I prefer security and quality. Sometimes I think you Apple bashers are just criminals/hackers trying to get your apps on the store to steal our data to use for nefarious reasons and are pushing your agenda to try to force a company to bend to your needs.

 

[sillypooh]

Love it. To the point, borderline blunt. Gets the message across. Perfect.

 

[i.mac]

- "We have over 250,000 apps in the App Store. We don't need any more Fart apps."

That sets an incredibly poor precedent. What happens when that becomes "We don't need another note-taking app, there's already a dozen", even when the new app offers a different interface that users may prefer?

This is the kind of stuff that happens when you can't install your own applications. It's Apple's idea that "You do have choices. You can choose from our preselected options A, B, and C" that becomes the problem. And attitudes like that (even if I agree with the uselessness of fart apps) will drive developers away in droves once they see their colleague's useful applications get rejected on those same grounds.

"We're not accepting any more video player apps, we already have 10". Yea ok Steve, watch as innovation within your app market stagnates.

Your driabite is pointless...

 

[smetvid]

They don't care about what you do on the web because it isn't their responsibility. They don't provide that content. For the same reason they won't prevent you from sexting or using FaceTime for video phone sex. Or from writing a pornographic novel in Pages.

They don't want to be involved in the creation, sale, or distribution of certain types of content.

Thats kind of my point. Why exactly does there need to be porn apps? I despise censorship with a passion but what exactly is the kick with making a porn app if the better way of viewing porn is the internet? If I were a company that made pron I wouldn't want to spend the high cost of developing an app when I can just run a pay for subscription website like everybody else. Demanding the app store selling porn is kind of like demanding Wal Mart or Best Buy sell porn which nobody does.

Unless somebody wants to make a porn hidden object game or nude RPG I just don't see the whole point. I mean we have never even seen such a dumb concept on a PC (Except for Leisure Suit Larry) and nobody restricts it there.

 

[benthewraith]

Buy a Droid and be happy then. Real world laws are curating your options too. Either it's good and you play along or find something else.

And carrier networks are locking down the androids with carrier apps one would have to root to delete.