Published in News

Developers miffed at Apple rules

by on12 December 2014

Making it up as it goes along

Developers are becoming more frustrated with the fruity cargo cult Apple’s “make it up as they go along” rules for acceptance in the app store.

Developers making use of new iOS features are finding their apps rejected by App Store staff and it appears that the problem is one of internal politics between three Apple executives.

The latest one to suffer was Panic Software which was told by Apple to remove an option to save files into iCloud Drive, the cloud storage option introduced with iOS 8 in September - even though doing so would also block it from saving files to other services too.

The three Apple executives involved in the spat are Ben Thompson of the Stratechery consultancy: Craig Federighi, is in charge of iOS 8 engineering, Eddy Cue, in charge of App Store promotion and editorial, and Phil Schiller, who is believed to be in charge of the App Store review team.

James Thomson, a Scottish developer wrote a calculator app PCalc, but was told the calculator “widget” he had added to the “Today” pane -broke the App Store rules.

Then within days the decision over PCalc was reversed as a result of internal discussions at Apple where the initial rejection by the App Store team was overruled by executives.

Joe Cieplinksi, creative director at Bombing Brain Interactive, wrote on his blog that the latest spate indicate to him that, “there’s clearly a conflict within Apple going on. I simply can’t believe that Craig Federighi’s team built all those wonderful new APIs into iOS 8 and didn’t intend for us to do anything interesting with them.”

He suggests that “I expect one of two things to happen in the coming months. Either the crazy rejections settle down or stop, or a high profile executive goes on gardening leave.”

There appears to be resistance to the new ideas being used in iOS 8, which copies many Android-style features, including the ability to add third-party keyboards may come from Schiller or his marketing team. Some in Apple consider this as heresy and against the true will of Steve Jobs.

 

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