Share

Ok.  I admit it…. I bought into the hype.

I heard about all the success stories of people developing neat little apps for the iPhone who only charged a couple dollars for the app and turned into millionaires over night.  I had already been teaching myself Objective-C/Cocoa on the Mac, so I thought to myself, “I’m a developer.  I’ve got all these friends with iPhones, I have a Mac with the latest Developer Tools, and the iPhone SDK is a free download…. whats stopping me?”

So I logged into my ADC account and downloaded the latest iPhone SDK.  Then I downloaded and watched HOURS of training and introduction videos, read through a ton of documentation, and even built a little “Hello World!” app and tested it in the little iPhone Virtual Machine that comes with the SDK.

But that was pretty much as far as I got.  Why?

Well let me start by saying that I don’t actually own an iPhone…. while I like the idea of it and I dig the vast community of developers and available applications for it, there are some things about it that are deal-breakers for me personally.

1) I can’t stand AT&T.  Like seriously…. I REFUSE to deal with them.  Yeah, sure, I know there are some not-so-legal ways to get one to work with another provider, but I don’t want to deal with that crap.

2) The lack of cut-and-paste functionality until the newest release of iPhone OS (ver. 3.0) to me is atrocious.

3) The lack of MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) until the newest release of iPhone OS is simply unbelievable to me.  How does a phone as technically advanced as the iPhone not get MMS support until it’s 3rd generation of the OS?!?!?!  My last 2 phones had MMS capability long before the iPhone.  I thought MMS was STANDARD.

But hey, maybe I’m just a stickler.  I realize some of my gripes have since been fixed, but seriously…. spending like 2 years sending MMS messages to my many friends who have iPhones only to get a message back saying “Dude…. I can’t get picture messages… I gotta log into a website just to see what the hell you sent me” is severely irritating.

Anyway, ranting aside, that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be a neat platform to develop for and there is a HUGE audience.  And since I don’t actually need an iPhone to develop for it, I figured “Why not?”.  So I started by asking some friends and random people I ran into on the interwebs what kind of app/tool they’d like to see for the iPhone.  I didn’t want to start out being like all those other D-bags out there that just put together some silly, totally usesless app that really does nothing constructive and only displays a red light or plays a sound.

I wanted to develop something useful.  Even if it was just something simple.  Something that people could actually use and make life easier.  Something that had a purpose.

I got plenty of feed-back and sorta proto-typed a couple ideas, but then I started looking ahead and asked myself a simple question, “How would I distribute my app?”  Well, the answer is really quite obvious: The App Store.  The App Store is run by Apple and it acts as centralized location (sort of a software super mall for the iPhone) where you can go and download all kinds of 3rd party applications for your iPhone.

But theirin lies the problem….

There are SO MANY apps for the iPhone and so many more being submitted everyday, Apple’s staff simply cannot keep up with it.  And since Apple insists on regulating which apps make it into the App Store and which ones do not, as a developer, you really are at the mercy of Apple.  They control everything about the process.  Application updates, release cycles, and can even remotely delete your application from all iPhones.  Not to mention the policies Apple is using to accept or deny an application is utterly insane.  Many times they deny with absolutely NO EXPLANATION AT ALL.

After reading countless articles from iPhone developers like Marco Arment, I couldn’t help but decide to just bail on the idea all together.  And I’m not alone.

The iPhone developer’s world is a depressing and frustrating one (at best).  Which leads me to my next logical question:  Why would Apple treat it’s developer community so poorly when its us, as developers, that made the iPhone so popular to begin with?

I mean, let’s face it: most of the reason the iPhone is so wildly popular is because of all the neat apps that come with it and the vast amount of apps you can get for it.  They’ve got an app for everything.  Literally.  And Apple even advertises this fact on television.  I’m really not trying to hate on Apple or the iPhone.  I want to support both by developing for said platform.  But anyone with a brain in their head can take one look at the situation and immediately be forced to ask themselves, “Do I really want to deal with that nightmare?”

“Do I really want to write software with both my hands tied behind my back?”

Well my conclusion is this: The App Store is broken.  Not functionally to the end user, but politically to the developer.  Other than the possibility of money, there really is no incentive to develop for the iPhone.  Combine the App Store issues with the oversaturation of apps already on the iPhone (there are probably hundreds of apps that all do the same thing, but in a slightly different way (like RSS readers, etc.)) and to me, there just isn’t really much of a reason to invest the time or effort.  It is possible to distribute your app via direct download from your own website, but let’s face it: you’ll never reach the audience that the App Store has.  The plain and simple fact is, when an iPhone user wants an app, they go to the App Store.  End of discussion.  So if you want to be a successful developer on the iPhone platform, you don’t have much choice but to crawl in bed with Apple and hope for the best.

It’s a sad thing really.  Because when developers start walking away from a platform, that is when the platform starts to loses it’s shine.  And that’s when it becomes just another novelty gadget, destined to be replaced by the next best thing.