Mojomonkey Coding

Yet another big developer has abandoned the platform.

Joe Hewitt, the creator of the iPhone Facebook app has stopped developing for the iPhone blaming the App Store review process as the reasoning. He was quite a high-profile developer releasing lots of tools with the Three20 project. Joe has continually complained about the pain of the review process on his blog, and it seems that he has finally had enough.

“Time for me to try something new. I’ve handed the Facebook iPhone app off to another engineer, and I’m onto a new project.”

What is it going to take before Apple realizes they are blowing it?

Is the development of a stand alone iPhone application a viable model to run a business on? I tend to wonder. With the current state of the App Store, the inability to quickly, easily and effectively find an application that might meet your needs, the difficulty of the developer to get it in front of the user, the reliance (and ultimately the bottleneck) of waiting on approval that can take weeks or months, can you run a business that does nothing but write iPhone applications? Maybe, if you are one of the top 5% who happens to really nail a market and appear in the Top 5 repeatedly, but that’s not going to be many of us (even those who do write an awesome app). My feeling is, you had better enter the iPhone market as a complement to a primary business strategy. Almost every app I use on my phone (save for the couple games I play) complement a service I have already used. Evernote, Instapaper, Netnews Wire, Twitter, Facebook, etc. All of these applications do not require an iPhone to use, but having the iPhone Apps make the experience significantly better. My current feeling is to make iPhone development worth it in a financial sense, it needs to be a value-add to a current service you already provide. Using the iPhone to enhance an existing experience will make the existing service more profitable.

There is a lot of hoopla over Google’s last app (Google Voice) not being approved for release on the App Store. Apple has been in the news multiple times about the App Store and most of it negative. There is no doubt that something smells at Apple when it comes to the process of application approval. They have got to clean this up or they will find themselves losing their market dominance. Now, I don’t have any inside scoop on what is going on with the Google Voice debacle, so I can’t comment to much on it. But with all the negativity and apparent anti-developer behavior on the part of Apple why do people continue to develop for the platform?

I can only speak for myself, but there continue to be enough intriguing benefits to writing for the iPhone.

1. One Man Shops Possible - It’s been awhile since a single developer could do something that made a real splash. The ability to spend some time at your home, develop an application and have a chance (no matter how small) of selling it and making real money is incredibly enticing. The Garage development mentality is why many of us got into programming. In my case, I started programming at a young age writing games for my friends on an old Commodore 64. That feeling is what keeps me going; doing my own thing and getting it in front of other people. Being able to develop a product that can be put on a store to be placed in front of the eyes of thousands, maybe even millions, and Apple takes care of all distribution concerns is empowering.
2. Deliver to a Known Platform – One of the biggest pains when developing software is optimizing for the lowest common denominator with unknown hardware. You don’t know what graphics capability the system has, does it have a web cam, what is the primary input? With the iPhone, you know exactly what you have at your disposal iPod Touch through three generations of iPhone. You’ll have a camera, touch screen, location device (of varying accuracy). You can write your program for a single platform and you’ll know how it will look for every customer you have. Your only worry is making sure it runs fast enough on the slowest (1st Gen iPhone) machine.
3. iPhone is the Current Top Dog - Fact of the matter is the iPhone continues to dominate the smart phone market. It’s the hippest, coolest thing around and getting visibility here is highly desirable. It’s a beautiful piece of electronics, with a clean UI and a reputation for having only the best applications (never mind the fact that of the 60,000 applications on the store the vast majority are utter trash). When you think of the iPhone you think of elegance. That’s a club I want to be part of.
4. New Skills – Objective-C is a new language for me. And the language of choice for my platform of choice. I’m a recent (2 years) convert to the Mac platform, and enjoy it enough that I would love to continue working on it. As such, it is always good to develop skills that can be utilized here, knowing Objective-C, Cocoa, UIKit and Cocoa Touch provides skills needed for Mac Development. Even if I don’t produce award winning iPhone applications, I’m still building up the skills to continue trying and possibly get paid to do so.
5. Enjoyment of the Language and Tools - And while attempting to learn new skills to stay on my platform of choice I’ve really come to appreciate the language and the development tools provided. I’ve come to feel that Objective-C is an elegant well design language, Cocoa and the Foundation classes are beautifully thought out with clean interfaces and detailed documentation. Xcode, Interface Builder, Instruments and Shark have provided me with tools to quickly get applications up and running. I’ve never been able to build a working application (admittedly simple) with a clean, good looking UI as fast as I have with Xcode and Interface Builder. The tools were developed in 1988 for NeXT and continually improved and iterated on. 20 years later, they have turned into a clean efficient suite of development tools.

Apple has had a phenomenal first year of sales on the App Store. But, they have had a lot of negative publicity due to some of their poor choices. I hope the spend the upcoming years improving this process and getting things in line, as I continue to be part of it for awhile.