First off, apologies to Mike Lee for the essentially identical post title, but the play on words is too good and too obvious to pass up.
So, as you are no doubt aware, the iPhone 3G came out a few days ago, and with it the much-anticipated App Store. Accessible through iTunes, it is a centralized place to find applications for your iPhone or (gasp) iPod touch. The idea of aggregating all the third-party software for a particular platform in one place is nothing new, you may remember the Palm OS? Now long dead, at one time people actually used it and wrote software for it, and Palm listed all that software on their website. Who knows, they might even still do it, but I’m not masochistic enough to go check. Anyways, an application store has been done before, but never for a platform that I like and never by a company that I like, so I was really pumped at the prospect of it actually being done well.
What I was really excited about was the exclusivity. When the beta of the iPhone SDK was released I heard people were having trouble getting in, but all my favorite developers blogged shortly after that they’d been admitted, so I concluded that Apple was just being really selective and only letting quality developers in. Which is awesome. Mad props to Apple for ensuring a certain level of quality.
And a few months later the App Store launched and some fantastic apps by my favorite developers launched with it, but if growing up with the internet hadn’t made me exceptionally good at finding things I would be completely unable to. There is so much crap on the App Store right now that I actually dread going back there everyday to see what’s new.
Let’s look at some of the crap:
- Erica Sadun made a nice little free program called Light that turns your screen white, allowing it to be used a flashlight. Nice, huh? Thank god 20 other people did as well, and some are even charging for it.
- Some twat decided to make a separate application for every Project Gutenberg book. As of yet there 108 individual book/applications. These are old, classic books that are free online. So instead of writing an eBook reader and charging $5 for it, and having it pull down free books from the internet, he made each book a separate application and is charging a $1 per book.
- Certain developers have started gaming the app directory by altering the name of their applications to appear at the beginning of the lists when sorted alphabetically, like “$0.99 Sudoku Classic” and ” Jirbo Bounce”. Note the leading space in Jirbo Bounce.
This is absolutely ridiculous. All these people should have their developer keys revoked immediately. These people aren’t human, they’re idiots, and as pissed as I am at them, I’m even more pissed at Apple. Apple said they were going to review all developers and review all applications. I can understand a dumbass developer getting in—just because a person is unknown shouldn’t preclude them from being admitted; some of the best apps come from students and people nobody has ever heard of, but surely Apple could have pulled the plug when they saw the crap they were submitting. Goddammit.
July 14, 2008, 6:20pm
