inconsequence

I’ve commented on the App Store approval process before from the position of a potential future App Store supplicant, but now that theory has become practice my feelings have changed. But this doesn’t mean I’m completely in the App Store is broken camp (paulgraham.com).

Apparently Apple’s attitude is that developers should be more careful when they submit a new version to the App Store. They would say that. But powerful as they are, they’re not powerful enough to turn back the evolution of technology. Programmers don’t use launch-fast-and-iterate out of laziness. They use it because it yields the best results. By obstructing that process, Apple is making them do bad work, and programmers hate that as much as Apple would.

Paul Graham (my emphasis)

From the point of view of a developer, the App Store approval process is just horrible. You basically submit your app and wait. And wait. And eventually you either get rejected with some kind of set of suggested changes (my wife’s experiences in Academia have led us to refer to this as “revise and resubmit”), rejected outright, or (you hope) accepted. In the best of all possible worlds, you produce a new or updated app and … some time later … it appears online.

The worst case scenarios are, in large part, well-known. Apps left in limbo. Bizarre and inconsistent rejections. Apps made with annoyingly conservative content or feature sets to avoid potential rejection or handle insufficiently specific rejections. Yuck.

Also annoying is the idea that, say, an App has a problem, the problem has been fixed, but there’s a bureaucratic snarl between me and the solution. The developer is ticked off because he/she looks bad. The customer is annoyed because he/she is living with a problem. And Apple looks bad because of both of the above.

So I reread Paul Graham’s (as usual) thoughtful take on the whole thing the other day when I was trawling his site for new essays (there were several, Paul is a super smart guy and a very good writer) and his issues with the App Store approval process seemed suddenly much more compelling. But as I was turning it all over in my head this morning, it struck me that (a) Apple knows all this, (b) Apple isn’t stupid, (c) the App Store approval process is obviously quite complex and expensive to administer; so why was Apple persisting with this obviously broken model?

Let’s take a step back for a moment and think about how the App Store submission process affects both developers and customers:

Developer

• If I fix a bug in my program, I can’t just recompile and stick it on my website where one of the various automatic update mechanisms can send it straight out to all my customers as their apps “phone home”. This sucks, because I like fixing stuff and my customers really appreciate getting quick fixes.
• If my app is in the submission queue and I discover a bug and fix it, I need to trade off waiting for the current version to get approved/rejected or reject my own submission and lose my spot in the queue. This sucks because it creates an incentive for me to leave buggy apps in the queue rather than send out my latest, greatest binary.
• It’s unfair for me to have to invest in developing an App not knowing if I’ll even be allowed to sell it.

Customer

• I want good software that Just Works and is easy to use.
• I don’t want apps that update themselves every time I launch them. On the other hand, I don’t like using out-of-date apps not knowing if I’m missing out on some really great new feature or risking running into some horrible bug that’s already been fixed.
• I don’t want to buy an app and then discover it doesn’t work any more or isn’t supported on the latest version of the OS.

It may seem like there’s an obvious win-win here that Apple is perversely ignoring. Let developers ship product when and where they want. Let customers buy the products they like. But actually that’s not true at all.

Here’s what the Wild West has delivered:

• Big Commercial Apps that treat OS updates as an opportunity to sell largely worthless version upgrades (I’m looking at you Adobe, Avid, Autodesk, Microsoft, et al.)
• Small Indie Apps that rev constantly so that every time you launch them it seems you need a new version. (“Install and Launch” is practically the equivalent of saying “good morning” to Acorn, GraphicConverter, etc.).
• Small Indie Apps that seem really great but never get to version 1.0, even after charging people for registration (The Hit List), or suddenly become unsupported with no word from the vendor (Silo 3d, Textmate).

Apple can’t do much about the last one except make it easier to track developers by reputation, but the App Store submission process is an attempt — a deeply flawed attempt, to be sure — to address the first two.

So here I am, Manta is in the queue, and I have a list of known bugs I am slowly working through. If I want to update my submission I will lose my place in the queue, so I am holding back my fixes until I get approved or rejected (since any issues leading to rejection will clearly be higher in priority than various things I think might need polishing). If I found a show-stopping issue, there’d be no point but to reject my own submission, but as things stand I think on balance I will stick it out.

Am I being “forced” to do “bad work”? No, I’m being forced into thinking of releases as being something I need to think about and not “whatever last compiled cleanly”. I’ve been selling software online since before it was terribly sensible to do so (e.g. when we sold Prince of Destruction online, we couldn’t handle credit card payments and most people had no idea what a website was) and the App Store submission process has certainly been useful and educational (and frustrating and scary) for me.

Arguably some developers don’t need to have this discipline enforced on them by Apple, but I don’t hear any of the likely candidates complaining (Omnigroup? Panic? Electronic Arts?). There are over 100,000 would-be App developers out there, and I’m guessing being forced to think in terms of concrete, well-defined, tested releases is going to be a big win for 99+% of them.

Stop whining and do a little QA.

Post Script

Manta has been approved and is now on sale in the App Store. Also, I added an image to the post.

Seriously, this is the best icon Apple could come up with?

iTunes 10 is out with “Ping”. The one good thing I can immediately say about Ping is that it’s not “one more useless account” (sadly, uselessaccount.com seems to be defunct). But that’s only because it hangs off of your AppleID (if you have one). Why is Apple entering the social media game? Pumping up their stock price would seem to be a dumb reason. Then again, Apple also got into the search portal game at one point (and I believe that was after Jobs’s second coming). Bear in mind that this was when search portals all sucked in different ways. Seriously — people would actually recommend altavista to their friends back then…

The usual reason Apple does things is that it thinks it can do them better than anyone else. Certainly, the way “following” works in Ping is intelligent, and the basic idea (form a circle of friends and share recommendations, vs. randomly “friend” people for no good reason) seems sound. In the end, MySpace and Facebook both started out as being primarily about music and became privacy invading quagmires. We’ll see. Right now I can find two Paul Simons and two Bjorks, but not the Paul Simon and the Bjork I’m interested in. (And seriously, they couldn’t get Bjork to sign on? Maybe she’s just too 1998.)

Ars Technica rightly pointed out that what we don’t need from iTunes is new features. What we need is better reliability and performance. Oddly enough, while Jobs made no mention of under-the-hood improvements, iTunes seems significantly more spritely.

I think I’m even willing to forgive this:

OK it's annoying, but it is consistent with the minified window.

As I approach six months of living with the iPad, it seems a good time to think about how it could be better. After all, we’re about to see a deluge of cheaper (or perhaps less obviously expensive) knock offs, and it’s worth reminding myself just how good this “1.0″ product is.

I was not an iPhone early adopter. I didn’t have the bandwidth to learn to develop software for it, and while it was a very impressive device, I was working from home and don’t use the phone very often. Most importantly, however, we were in the middle of a two year verizon contract. I think it’s safe to say that was the clincher, and it says a good deal about the anti-competitive nature of the US cellphone market.

The iPad doesn’t require a contract (even for the 3G version, which is something Apple hasn’t done a great job of communicating), which is one reason for its instant success.

Anyway, what’s wrong with the iPad?

Well, it’s going to need more memory. A lot of very nice iPad apps are clearly limited by available memory (e.g. the various excellent image apps, such as Sketchbook Pro and Art Studio have fairly harsh layer limits) and I often crash my browser (iCab) by having too many tabs going.

It’s going to need a camera — preferably two. Facetime is seriously awesome on the iPhone 4, but even mordant useful for me is the ability to use it’s camera as a rather high quality scanner. This lets me sketch something, photograph it, email it to myself, and then work on it with my iPad. But it would be nice to reduce this convoluted workflow to, e.g., “new layer from camera” right inside Art Studio, say.

I can understand Apple’s reluctance to put an SD card slot in the iPhone — e.g. one major source of problems in the iPhone is pocket lint being forced into the works of the iPhone through the earphone socket (seriously), and an SD card slot is going to make this problem much worse (although a plastic blank that can fill the slot when not in use would help). But, iPads don’t live in pockets, and the advantages of being able to work with images straight out of a camera would be huge.

Autocorrection needs a lot of love. To begin with, the widgets are just too small. It’s hard to press the “x” or the word precisely, and why can’t we have more than one suggestion? It’s also high time the correction code recognized things like “e.g.” and stopped trying to start new sentences.

While we’re on the topic, I think that the keyboard could probably use some tweaking. I wouldn’t mind a landscape keyboard with smaller keys and more of them (I have no problems typing on the portrait keyboard, so use keys that size and give me punctuation and numbers instead of bigger keys).

Standardized hard game controls are something Apple needs to start thinking about now, across all it’s products (including “iTV” if the rumors are true). I get that Apple is cleaning the rest of the game industry’s clock now despite having no capable middleware and treating game developers like second class citizens, but gaming made DOS and Windows successful and eventually folks will catch up close enough to Apple that not having a decent joystick is going to matter.

Heck, don’t build the damn things in, but just bless some kind of standard. Please.

The industrial design of the iPad is very much the ultimate expression of the iPhone design language. It’s nicer than any iPhone prior to the iPhone 4 (about even with the super slim iPod Touch) but next to the iPhone 4 it just looks old. I’d love to see the iPad redone in the new design language.

And that’s about it. Obviously doubling screen resolution (a la the iPhone 4) would be great when the cost benefit makes sense and we can always use more of everything, but really the iPad is pretty darn close to perfect. At 1.0.

iPhone 4's "flawed" antenna design

I’ve now had an iPhone 4 for about a month (as you no doubt recall, I queued for a product on launch day for the first time in my life) and my (apparently) free bumper case is in the mail (it’s in Netherlands orange — so much for my plans to bask in reflected glory).

A friend of mine used to joke that if Microsoft ever released a version of Word that actually worked it would go out of business. Word is the very heart of Microsoft’s revenue stream: people buy PCs (and thus Windows) to run Word, not the other way around. People upgrade their PCs to run newer versions of Word they hope might address their current problems with Word. So it follows that once people have a version of Word they’re happy with, Microsoft would be in big trouble.

Word hasn’t become a perfect product, but it’s good enough and Microsoft’s record of improving it is bad enough that no-one feels very compelled to upgrade. But Microsoft isn’t in trouble. The fact is that a lot of computers are out there and they die fairly often, so just based on the need to maintain the fleet, Microsoft will make money for a long, long time, but its days of giddy expansion are behind it. It’s gone from being the phone company of the late 19th century (rapaciously devouring competitors) to being the phone company of the 1950s (fat and happy and utterly dominant).

The iPhone 4 just works. Forget the baloney about its “flawed antenna design” — no-one who has one cares. It has awesome battery life, runs as fast as an iPad, is a better camera than a point-and-shoot (except for lacking optical zoom), feels like a piece of jewellery in your hands, and is rock solid (yeah you can smash one if you drop it on concrete). And here’s the kicker — it’s price competitive with its shoddy plastic rivals that run “free” open source software (developed by an advertising company to spy on its customers and deliver ads to them). All this, and Apple’s margins are almost certainly higher than its rivals’, which means that in a race to the bottom, Apple won’t bother competing.

It follows that Apple is doomed. The original iPhone was a great idea for a device, crippled by lousy battery life and a slow CPU, that became enormously successful in chief because its rivals were so incredibly worse (kind of like Word vs. Wordperfect). Of course, what Apple is doomed to is becoming a fat happy complacent company raking in cash for generations.

I hope the title of my post drives down Apple’s stock price a little bit further, but I’m not holding my breath.

Apple got 600,000 pre-orders for the iPhone 4 on launch day. AT&T’s web servers basically died (but not before failing in even more embarrassing ways). Apparently Apple’s Apple Store App (specifically developed to streamline pre-orders) also had issues (my wife and I only had one problem with it — it wouldn’t let us preorder two phones from one iTunes account, so Rosanna had to go update her ancient, unused iTunes account specifically to pre-order her iPhone).

This is amazing, but should hardly be a surprise. The iPhone 4 is the first major iPhone revision to follow the first really big wave of iPhone purchases (i.e. the ones that followed the release of the 3G) when the people who bought those plans are able to upgrade within plan. That’s certainly my case. Everyone I know who has an iPhone 3G and is eligible plans to upgrade, and most have pre-ordered.

Why?

Here’s what I said the iPhone would do for me before I actually bought one:

• Not replace a laptop. Correct. The iPad hasn’t replaced my laptop either.
• Allow me to read product reviews in stores before buying. Absolutely correct. More importantly, it lets me price compare while I’m in stores, which often leads me to rethink a purchase or simply save money.
• Read books. Incorrect. Nope the display isn’t up to it.
• Replace iPod. Correct. And I’ve always got it with me (whereas I’d usually not have the iPod when I most wanted it).
• Replace paper notebooks. Incorrect. But the iPad has.
• Be a decent personal organizer. Correct. Actually better than correct — recurring alarms are totally awesome.
• Get photos from phone without paying service provider. Correct. And they’re surprisingly good. I also use it as a scanner in a pinch, which is awesome.
• Make my own (free) custom ringtones. Correct.
• Replace my DS. Correct. The only thing I’ve done with my DS since getting the iPhone is play Scribblenauts for a few hours.
• Develop apps. Finally shipping in July I hope!
• Replace (good) pocket calculators. Correct.
• Fail to stop me pining for an updated Newton. Correct — and neither has the iPad. (I want pressure-sensitive stylus support.)
• Stream internet radio. Correct, although the twins pick what we get to listen to on road trips these days. Argh!
• Fail to replace my Panasonic TZ-5. Pretty much incorrect, because I’ve always got it, and the photo quality is very good. (In fact on one vacation my DSLR ran out of juice and all I had was the iPhone, which took some pretty nice pictures.)

But, for all its many virtues, the iPhone 3G has lousy battery life, its slow, its camera is lackluster, and, let’s face it, the curved shape is getting old. $199 (or $299) may seem like a lot, but bear in mind what it replaces. The last time I bought an iPhone I looked at the gadgets I’d never buy again (e.g. Nintendo DS, Cell Phone, iPod) and the price suddenly became a bargain. The new phone is replacing point-and-shoot cameras and video camcorders (like my beloved Panasonic TZ-series or the Flip) in a way that the 3G didn’t. Just two weeks ago I was amazed to see the previous generation Panasonic TZ camera (basically just like the current one, without GPS) selling for $170 in Costco and was sorely tempted until I realized that for $199 (of course I’m getting the $299 version, but that’s not the point) an iPhone 4 would (a) shoot HD video, (b) include GPS, and (c) not be one more damn thing to carry around and recharge. This is without even considering its virtues as a phone, iPod, or iPhone 3G replacement.

It’s the Convergence baby.

Meanwhile, the only company in the world that’s as user-focused as Apple has a new trick up its sleeve.

Nintendo has been showing off a new prototype DS with a genuine, working, apparently non-sucky 3D display. This sounds like a pretty wondrous device, but one has to ask if it justifies its existence against the iPhone or iPod Touch. In the end, pretty much anything in the way of a gaming console, computer, audio or video accessory, or camera these days is a computer, and why buy, maintain, and carry around more than the minimum number? If my iPhone could support a large display, keyboard, and mouse when docked — why would I want anything else?

I’d probably be more tempted if their launch game weren’t Zelda. (And MGS is barely any better.) I’ve never even gotten half-way through a Zelda game before becoming too bored and frustrated to continue.

Nintendo can sell new gameboy variants to its user base with features as banal as a new headphone Jack, so I have no doubt this gadget will sell, but in the end it only staves off convergence. To actually compete in the long term, the DS needs to start boring other stuff, and that’s not going to happen.