Joe Hewitt Voices his Concern Over Apple’s App Store

A few weeks ago Facebook developer Joe Hewitt announced that he would stop making iPhone applications because he was fed up with the way Apple is running its App store. The main problem facing Joe, as well as many other developers, has to do with Apple’s policies on the applications.

“My decision to stop iPhone development has had everything to do with Apple’s policies. I respect their right to manage their platform however they want, however I am philosophically opposed to the existence of their review process. I am very concerned that they are setting a horrible precedent for other software platforms, and soon gatekeepers will start infesting the lives of every software developer.”

Creating a ‘middleman’ as Joe mentioned, is something that developers would quite easily get frustrated with. Instead of developers being able to fix it themselves, they have to work through a middleman (in this case Apple).

Rules, restrictions and a review process do not really make it a developer friendly medium to sell applications. Meanwhile the web is ‘still unrestricted and free’, if Apple made it difficult for one of the world’s biggest iPhone app developers, imagine what it would be like for all of the others? Hence why Joe Hewitt has decided to return to his roots as a web developer.

“I am returning to my roots as a web developer. In the long term, I would like to be able to say that I helped to make the web the best mobile platform available, rather than being part of the transition to a world where every developer must go through a middleman to get their software in the hands of users.”

The Facebook iPhone app (currently the most popular application in the history of the iPhone) has had some major bugs-namely one I noticed whilst using it myself. When users try to view a friend’s profile page, each users profile reads “User has no recent posts”.

FaceBook has responded in regards to this issue:

“this is the result of a backend Platform API issue, not the iPhone app. We are pushing a fix shortly.”

Joe Hewitt’s departure from Apple iPhone application development marks the first major boycott from Apple’s App store as a result of its approval process. The store has been surrounded by controversy about their inconsistent and arbitrary approval process for developer applications; with everyone from Nine Inch Nails front man Trent Reznor to search giant Google getting caught in its web.

If boycotting Apple’s iPhone for application development becomes a trend it may create many opportunities for both Microsoft and Google to claim market share with their own mobile app platforms. For now however, it’s just one developer (albeit a fairly well-known one) leaving the world’s most popular mobile application development scene.

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Tags: App Store, Apple, Apps, Facebook, iPhone, Joe Hewitt, Online, Technology