The reason Apple wants to approve applications before their release is to protect customers from applications that could be harmful (could an app purposefully erase your address book?) or crash-prone or have impossibly confusing user interfaces. Or, at least, one would assume that is the reason. But then one takes a tour of the app store and finds plenty of applications fitting those categories, sitting happily released. We’ve all seen terrible interfaces, we’ve all had apps crash like crazy, and we’ve all read about apps that were found to be sending full copies of your contact list to a private server. Apple didn’t stop any of that from happening. So what exactly is the point?
Personally, Apple’s approval process is hurting my business. Version 1.1 of Ego was approved on Tuesday night at 9PM, and immediately I began receiving support emails about Google Analytics issues for certain customers. It turns out that a small tweak had been made to some code regarding profiles between the time I submitted version 1.1 for approval and its release. I was in Austin and traveling back to NYC the next morning, but as soon as I got home, I fixed the bug. Luckily, in this case, it was fixable on the server-side so I didn’t need to release an app update.
However, multiple profiles in Google Analytics all share the same account name, something I didn’t realize when trying to get 1.1 out the door. Due to this, if you create more than one widget based on a profile in the same account, it will currently have the same label in Ego. So last night I made a quick change that allows you to set a custom label for all Google Analytics widgets and submitted version 1.1.1 to Apple for approval.
I’ve been developing for a long time. I don’t like someone else standing between me and bug fixes. Right now, there are people sending nasty support emails, Twitter replies, and rating the application 1 star because they can’t label each GA widget. Normally, in any other situation, they’d already have the fix (and the total time from Apple’s approval of 1.1 to my submitting 1.1.1 to them was ~22 hours). But now I sit, watching the poor reviews stack up, watching the emails roll in, while I wait another week for Apple to approve this minor bug fix.
This system isn’t helping customers and it isn’t helping developers.
