Rogue Amoeba CEO Paul Kafasis recently announced on the company’s blog that they are discontinuing development for the iPhone platform. Paul talks candidly about the challenges they have faced in the iPhone app approval process in general and in particular, and the business aspects that led him to his position. Rogue Amoeba is not the first Mac developer to abandon the iPhone platform because of the approval process. Paul compares his position with others, explains why the process doesn’t seem to scale, and offers some ideas to help solve the problem.
Links:
Subscribe to MacVoices in iTunes
MacLevelTen – The Mac Media Group
Airfoil Speakers Touch in the iTunes Store
Radioshift Touch in the iTunes Store
Airfoil Speakers Touch 1.0.1 Finally Ships by Paul Kafasis on the Rogue Amoeba blog
iPhone Superguide comes to the App Store… eventually by Jason Snell on Macworld
FaceBook Joe Hewett
One Little Article by Paul Kafasis on O’Reilly’s Inside iPhone Blog
As a long-time customer and fan of Rogue Amoeba’s apps for the Mac, I understand Paul’s frustrations. Apple’s app review process is flawed and there don’t seem to be any clear and sensible guidelines. One finds totally stupid and badly written apps there as well as quality stuff by serious Mac developers like Paul. I like the idea of alternate sources, with a disclaimer by Apple to cover it from spurious lawsuits, or a real review of apps with better guidelines – the recent scandal of an app that harvested a user’s information when the app was run is a good example. Either Apple gets its stuff together and does a serious overhaul of it’s approval criteria (and possibly trains it’s reviewers more thoroughly) or it is going to keep on losing the best app developers.