The App store solution

Apple has taken a lot of heat over the past few weeks especially with regard to their app store policies. As a software developer, it scares me to think about working on a project for weeks, months, or even a year without knowing if that app will pass the approval process. This, I believe, is going to make iPhone developers weary of developing for the iPhone.

I believe that there is a simple solution to this, short of Jason Calacanis' great idea of just giving is an "allow unsupported apps" button. My solution is this: Hey Apple, you know those NDA's you love to make your faithful sign? Well agree to go the other way here too. What I mean is "sign" an NDA with developers and then create 2 approvals. Concept and Code. That way a developer could submit a concept for an app, and if approved they have exclusive rights to build it. This way developers would know that the app wouldn't be blocked for concept after spending a lot of time and money developing it.

And now that I am thinking about it, Apple could use a system like this to find out what kind of apps the users really want. They could allow non-developers to submit ideas, and let developers that want to build those apps do it. They could even reward the person who submitted the idea with part of the app revenue. (30 percent Apple, 20 percent idea, 50 percent developer?)

Although does apple really care about whether the users get the apps they really want?

The iPhone 10MB Limit, and how it hurts apple.

So you are sitting in a doctor's office, and in the waiting time, you decide to browse the app store. The first problem, is that the app store is set up in a way that makes browsing it roughly as enhoyable as the route canal you will be experiencing in just a few minutes time. But alas, you troop through and find a game that you want to download to pass the time. You click to download only to get that lovely error message "This is over 10MB, please connect to a computer or wifi network".

It has gotten to the point now that if I find a game I like, I instinctively check its size, BEFORE I check the price. Because regardless of how much it costs, if I can't download it now, I dont want it. There are a lot of games and apps I have found (probably about 100 dollars worth) that if I could have downloaded them I would have, but Apple is effectively stopping the impulse buy, and making the user say, "Do I really need that?".


I am sure this is a restriction that AT&T came up with. But if they are going to enable tehtering, as they say they are, then why not throw us a bone here, and let us download our apps no matter the size.