Now that you don’t spend time on iPhone Dev., when will we see an update of PowerTunes that supports Applications;-)

/Mikael

When I saw the number of overlapping features in list making apps on the App Store, I breathed a sigh of relief. It looked like one of my fears, that Apple would dictate which apps in a category were worthy, wouldn’t be realized.

The example I give is Zenbe Lists. I use it for grocery lists, not because it’s the best tool for that task, but because I need quick easy sync with my wife. If somebody came out with a mediocre grocery list app with fast sync, even if we could agree that in every other way it was inferior to what was already at the store, I would probably use it for that feature alone. There does not exist a single global objective ordered list of software quality.

So, I was hopeful when I saw redundancy.

When I heard about apps being rejected for silly stuff like using vibration where it shouldn’t have been used, I was a bit concerned. But that seemed like it would get fixed.

NetShare worried me a lot, but it still seemed like it was a potential special case that Apple had not thought about people doing.

“I am rich” is what really scared me. It fit into the “I know it when I see it” category. That’s not the standard that is acceptable to me for the App Store. If Apple had issued a statement saying, essentially, “While we know that ‘I Am Rich’ is not malicious, it is a ridiculous app that is just trying to prove a point” or something that implied that they thought this was a special case, I would’ve felt a bit better.

Rejecting a podcasting app because iTunes does podcasting is damned near my precise fear of what was going to happen. Fuzzy, ill-defined, and with *zero* communication from Apple about it.

An anonymous poster on the original article claimed that Apple had rejected another podcasting app earlier.

So, if this guy hadn’t gone public and gotten publicity…every few weeks a well-meaning developer will submit a kick-ass podcasting app to Apple, only to have it rejected.

Apple *needs* to communicate these rules. They need to provide examples of what they won’t approve.

Actually, what they need to do is stop acting as the sole and exclusive gatekeeper to iPhone apps. Apple has had a reputation for so many years of being a gatekeeper and preventing third party development…because, you know, obviously there would’ve been millions of people making NuBus expansion cards if Apple had just said it was OK…

This behaviour is, IMHO, going to become a significant barrier to them increasing their market share. It provides ammunition to the old canard that Apple has to approve third party apps on the Mac. I heard somebody say that even this year…