I love my iPhone for all sorts of reasons. One of them is that although it has a terrible camera (as mobile phone cameras go – and yes, even the new 3GS camera is pretty crappy in comparison to the rest of the market), it’s fun to use.
Because I take my phone everywhere, I have a camera with me nearly all the time. It’s no hassle to get photos from the phone to my computer. I can distribute my photos to various online locations from the phone itself (Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, etc) – and yes I know other phones do this too, but I’m talking about my phone. Finally, there are plenty of really cool apps in the App Store that tart up the photos it produces, making it even more fun to use.
Ah, the App Store. It’s a wonderful invention for sure, something all the other operators are tripping over themselves to emulate as soon as humanly possible. However, there’s a dark side to the App Store that’s no secret whatsoever in the blogosphere. To get your app approved, someone in Apple’s App Store Review team has to approve your work. There are very clear guidelines as to what’s not allowed – some cultural (such as ‘no porn’) but most technical (don’t use undocumented APIs, for example).
However it seems no two Apple App Reviewers are reading from the same hymn book. What slips past the net for one app will get another rejected. John Gruber, a hugely influential and outspoken tech/Apple blogger, wrote an amusing post about this recently, ‘Diary of an App Store Reviewer’. It covers the problems very clearly.
And now to the point of this entry, which is that most of the photo apps I’ve been using have got through the 3.0 updating process (by which they tweak their apps to make sure they work as expected on the new iPhone operating system, then re-submit the update to Apple) but several have not updated as yet (although some of them do appear to still work, if a little flakily).
One big app I used to use a lot is QuadCamera. At time of writing the developer, Takayuki Fukatsu, has had no response whatsoever to his submitted update, and is seeing his colleagues being similarly forced to wait and wait and wait and wait and wait – or worse, just get rejected. Here’s some excerpts from his Twitter feed on the matter (bearing in mind English isn’t his first language):
I send 3.0 version month ago, but no feedback since that. ToyCamera and oldCamera works fine
Now I’m keep on trying to get it approved. But apple’s review is actually black-holl.
Please do not remove QuadCam from your iPhone yet. I’m still keep trying to contact with Apple.
I think we should make Killed Camera app List for iPhone OS3.0 asap, many developer and user need it.
I thins easycam, standardcam, bullcam, molopics, 25shot, bullcam does not work as well.
also I heard great poralize doesn’t run
That last tweet refers to Polarize, a cool app that treats your photo like a Polaroid, gives it the distinctive frame and lets you ‘scribble’ a caption on the bottom using a built-in handwriting font. My experience is that Polarize will process a photo you load into it from the camera roll, but rarely manages to save a photo you take and directly with the app.
Anyway, then today Takayuki posted a link to an article on CrunchGear. It’s an interview with Jared Brown, developer of a wee camera app called QuickShot. I don’t really know what his app does as I’ve never used it, but the article itself makes it clear that technically speaking, practically all camera apps contravene some part of the new OS 3.0 SDK agreement (the small print that says what apps are allowed to be doing under the bonnet).
The problem? His app, that’s been doing what it does since Day Zero, is now being rejected on the grounds that one of the processes contravenes the SDK rules, despite it never having been a problem before and, crucially, that there are apps in the store that have been updated and approved in the last week that do exactly the same thing.
It really does seem like there are a bunch of folk sitting around in the App Store Review department that haven’t got a sodding clue what the rules are, how to review an app, what their colleagues are approving or rejecting and why, and basically don’t take it seriously at all.
Apple created a viable new marketing model with the App Store and provided a place where bedroom coders could outsell the likes of EA, but now they’re taking money and consumer trust away from the developers who populate the Store by arbitrarily punishing some and not others.
Put simply, what the fuck, Apple?
