iPhone developers in danger of excessively playing the blame game.
There is a growing trend that I've been seeing with the iPhone developer community and it's bothering me. Blame Apple this, blame Apple that. Playing the blame game. I've already done that a couple of times. There are valid ones that Apple did did a bad job in communicating with App developers and I've read horror stories on how apps are being held up in Apple's review cycle for months and later was rejected for a trival violation of their UI guide.
As a matter of fact, I've personally have had that experience with smackBOTS Challenge, our light version of smackBOTS. smackBOTS Challenge had gotten the notice of unexpected delay and went into limbo for 2 months. One fine day, I got a phone call from Apple's legal department and the Apple representative on the other side told me that the delay was due to the fact that we mentioned prizes in our App description and that's not allowed. He suggested we removed all references of any prizes in our description and he will forward the app review to the reviewers. 2 days later, smackBOTS Challenge was approved. I blamed Apple for this because it took them 2 months to communicate such a minute detail that was taken care of in a matter of minutes.
So alright, enough with my own stories but seriously, because of the way app reviews have been and the way that the appstore functions, developers everywhere are trying to push updates out as soon as possible. This practice is fine until app developers do that to the extend of sacrificing the quality of their apps, ie. releasing buggy software. So what prompted me this write all this rant? Well, another rant by Joe Stump that got posted on Techcrunch. Apparently, Joe has inside connections at Apple and he tried to work those connections to get more insights to why his app review was getting delayed. While it's great that Joe has his connections but imagine the number of developers like us, who did not. But I was happy to hear that his inside connections just referred him to email app reviewers instead and that's just being fair and not playing favors.
