All Articles Tagged rogue amoeba

After submitting a minor .1 bug fix for Airfoil Speakers Touch 1.0.1 [Free - iTunes link] for iPhone and iPod touch, longtime Mac developers Rogue Amoeba waited for what they assumed would be a routine App Store review. Three and a half months, three rejections, and the unsuccessful intervention of a champion at Apple, the app is finally in the store, but the developer has decided the process is too odorous to continue with the iPhone platform.

Don’t stop us just because you’ve heard this before over and over again.

The issue this time was Rogue Amoeba discovering the type of Mac and exact application that was being used as audio source, and displaying the corresponding Mac OS X-provided image of the machine and icon for the app.

Though standard — intended — behavior on the Mac, Apple’s App Store policy branded this a trademark violation and they requested it be changed. Rogue Amoeba assumed the request was erroneous and tried resubmitting, tried escalating via email, even had a champion inside Apple try help get it through. In the end, the App Store policy was an immovable object, and Rogue Amoeba had to remove the Mac and app icon images. Airfoil Speakers Touch 1.0.1 was then approved and placed in the app store.

(And during the whole process, Airfoil Speakers Touch 1.0, buggy as it was, and using the exact same artwork Apple had issue with in 1.0.1 was left untouched in the App Store for users to download and use).

In the future, we hope that developers will be allowed to ship software without needing Apple’s approval at all, the same way we do on Mac OS X. We hope the App Store will get better, review times will be shorter, reviews will be more intelligent, and that we can all focus on making great software. Right now, however, the platform is a mess.

The chorus of disenchanted developers is growing and we’re adding our voices as well. Rogue Amoeba no longer has any plans for additional iPhone applications, and updates to our existing iPhone applications will likely be rare. The iPhone platform had great promise, but that promise is not enough, so we’re focusing on the Mac.

Add our voice to the chorus: fix. this. More after the break…

Read the rest of this entry »

Paul Kafasis, who along with his fellow Rogue Amoeba’s raised some early concerns over the iPhone SDK, is back with a post WWDC status report, and his current opinion? Brokended.

After a month of waiting, with no contact from Apple save form letters that went out to all developers, we’d grown quite frustrated. We don’t know if we should invest our time in a platform for which we may not even be allowed to release software. Finally on April 8th, one of our developers decided to apply to the program as an individual, to see what would happen. Shockingly, in under 24 hours he had a certificate which enabled him to work on actual hardware.

Kafasis thinks that Apple is handling individual applications separately from — and for some reason much faster than — company applications, which he finds confusing given the possible impact of large development houses and the only real (and critical) differentiator of the $99 program acceptance being the ability to tether and test actual hardware (rather than simulators) and, of course, the ability to sell through the App Store. Ultimately, he believes the problem lies in Apple’s communications — not only its lack of clarity, but its complete lacking (almost a trademark of the tight lipped company).

iPhone dev expert extraordinaire Erica Sadun follows up with some analysis of her own:

25000 applied; 4000 admitted. By any stretch of the calculator, thats only about a 16% acceptance rate. It’s one that has left many independent OS X developers behind.

Was Apple overwhelmed by the sheer volume of applications? Have they botched the program from the get go? And what could they do now to help get developers (and their developments) back on track?

Rogue Amoeba (developers of such acclaimed apps as Audio Hijack and Airfoil) have been putting up a great series of blog posts on topics such as code signing and app restrictions, as well as a very interesting list of “bugs” submitted to Apple on the SDK.

First up, Mike Ash provides a breakdown of code-signed apps (applications which must be cryptographically signed by a developer and authorized by an authority — in this case Apple — in order to run), pro and con: better security and accountability vs. single point of control:

The most worrying one on the list [of disallowed apps], of course, is “Unforeseen”. This is basically a catch-all intended to give Apple an out in case anything comes up which they don’t feel like letting onto the device. Maybe some new class of evil app is developed which doesn’t quite fit into the above categories and Apple needs to block them. Or maybe Apple just doesn’t feel like having any competitors in a particular market, and wants to shut them all out.

Next, Quentin Carnicelli lays out why Apple needs to go “Back to the Future” and remember how it was a 3rd party dev, and not Apple itself, who helped fix core problems on the Mac:

When Steve Jobs first saw Switcher, his reply was: “It’s great. Apple is going to bundle it with the Mac. Congratulations.” Andy had writen a innovative application that improved the platform for every single user from there onward. Fast forward to today, if he had an iPhone instead of a Mac, it would have been legally impossible for him to do so. This is no mere hyperbole – the SDK agreement expressly forbids using non-public APIs, attempting to touch other applications, and running in the background, among other things.

Lastly, Paul Kafasis shares the iPhone SDK bugs Rogue Amoeba has filed with Apple to date, including feature requests for non-iTunes app delivery, multitasking, root access, Media-Picker for music and video, file-system access, host computer access, VoIP over EDGE, Dock access, and asks others to do likewise:

If you have an ADC account, you can submit your own bugs at http://bugreport.apple.com. Plenty of things are still in flux, and with input from users and developers, Apple may just see what a powerful platform the iPhone can be.

Rogue Amoeba isn’t sure they like Steve Jobs all dressed up in his dear leader robes . What do you think? Will Apple create an iPhone user-topia? Or does app-solute power corrupt?

(via DaringFireball and TUAW)