Apple’s iPhone & iPad platforms are pretty and delicious, and still miles ahead of the competition in smooth, attractive user interfaces.
But there are plenty of things to irk you as well. For web applications and Open Source developers like me, the most irksome are the limitations Apple places on software development and distribution.
Developers in the FOSS community have long lived by the motto “release early, release often”. Getting your programs into a lot of peoples’ hands early gives more opportunity for feedback; that includes direct code contributions, but bug reports and UX feedback are just as important even for people who aren’t sharing their source code! Releasing updates often gets bug fixes and new features into peoples’ hands quickly, which encourages the feedback cycle and makes for happy users.
Web developers have had the additional advantage of being able to roll out many software upgrades near-instantly to all their users: update the files on your servers and *poof* everyone using your app (“visiting your web page”) is using the latest code. If something went wrong and you introduced a bug, you can update to a fixed version or roll back to the last-good version just as quickly.
When you start pushing apps out for iPhone or iPad though… these doors are closed to you. A small fraction of users will have jailbroken the system so they can run arbitrary apps (and bully for them!) but to reach a general audience, you need to go through Apple as a middleman. To run any program on your phone, it either has to be obtained through their online store, or you need to jump through hoops with special limited-access development keys.
Aside from the ethical issues of whether it’s ok for one company to interfere in independent commerce between customers and developers, it also breaks FOSS and web-style development processes badly.
The pre-1.0 cycle becomes less useful because it’s harder to get people involved in testing and bug fixing during your early stages. You can’t even test a program on your own phone without paying Apple for access to the code-signing system, and having other people test it who aren’t also registered iPhone developers requires obtaining their device IDs ahead of each new release.
When you’re ready to push out to the App Store for wide distribution, you have to wait an arbitrary amount of time for review. That’s generally about a week of waiting, then an Apple reviewer pokes at your app for an hour or two. If you’re lucky, the reviewer confirms it looks ok and pushes it up for sale. If you’re unlucky, the nice Apple employee tells you there’s something you need to fix, and you fix it and wait another week.
If you’re extra unlucky, the nice Apple employee looks at it, decides it’s ok, and pushes it up for distribution… but it turns out you actually introduced a horrible bug that breaks the app completely for actual users. (Whoops!)
Until the fixed version gets through review, I’ve had to temporarily pull StatusNet Mobile from the iTunes App Store altogether to keep people from installing the broken version. We’re hoping that the review of the fix will go faster, or that Apple can revert our distribution to the last known-good release until it’s complete, but these options aren’t available under our direct control; I’ve asked and simply have to wait and hope.
In constrast, a web app breaking like this could have been fixed immediately, with the fix instantly visible to all users. An Android app breaking like this could be updated in the Market immediately, with users seeing update notifications within a day. A Windows, Linux, or Mac app could have a new version pushed out immediately, with probably moderately slower uptake depending on how you distribute your updates.
To be fair, Apple’s iTunes App Store system is remarkably liberal by the standards of game consoles and many older “mobile apps” models, where you need a lot more up-front negotiation & money with the hardware manufacturer or carrier. $99/year and a cut of sales for platform-exclusive sales channel isn’t awful; I’m not even sure how to find out how many hoops I’d have to jump through as an independent developer to whip up some little goodie for the Wii or Playstation 3 and get it out for legit sale to end-users.
But compared to what we’re used to on personal computers and the web, it’s extremely onerous for developers, and the side effects harm our users in directly visible ways.
Update 2010-10-25: Our StatusNet Mobile 1.0.3 update has been approved after 9 days sitting in the “in review” state without comment. It should appear in the App Store again shortly.