Update: Corrected misspelling of Marco Arment’s surname.
Joe Hewitt, developer of Firebug and Facebook’s iPhone application, writes in an article titled, Innocent Until Proven Guilty, that Apple’s review process for third party iPhone apps in the iTunes App Store should be eliminated entirely. I was impressed with this, as it’s really the elephant in the middle of the room, that few commenters seem to address. The driving justification behind Joe’s short article is quite powerful:
Does that sound scary to you, imagining a world in which any developer can just publish an app to your little touch screen computer without Apple’s saintly reviewers scrubbing it of all evil first? Well, it shouldn’t, because there is this thing called the World Wide Web which already works that way, and it has served millions and millions of people quite well for a long time now.
Indeed, somehow we’ve managed all these years. And while the Internet has brought us various catastrophic influenza and garbage, the iPhone OS is already exposed to those threats, and third party applications are sand-boxed to the point of being a much poorer vector for malicious activity than looking for your classic remote buffer overflow. Hewitt continues, emphasis mine:
If you think that all apps should be held prisoner by Apple until proven safe, you should also be able to convince yourself that this is how the web should work.
I think the issue becomes a bit clearer if you change that statement to read, “that this is how your personal computer should work.”
In any event, there are many other developers out there who’ve been beating the drums of discontent, griping at Apple and earning some page views in the process, but the writing is usually done with an oddly sycophantic bent. Marco Arment, who is prone to such outbursts (wherein he righteously chastises Apple but then repeats over and over how much he loves the company and the iPhone itself, perhaps to prove his bona fides), recently pushed back against Hewitt’s sentiment, offering the article, Apple can’t stop reviewing iPhone apps. His main point, that Apple has no choice but to continue to review all apps lest some rogue iFart yield bad press or screw it up for all of us, rings quite hollow and altogether avoids Hewitt’s challenge: should this be how the Internet works? More to the point, should it be how your personal computer works?
Even if Apple stopped reviewing apps completely, they would still be blamed in the press for the effects of problematic apps. This creates a difficult position: Apple must attempt to be the gatekeeper in a market full of gray areas, but any decisions they make fall under intense scrutiny, and many decisions don’t have an indisputably “good” option.
Apple must attempt to be the gatekeeper? Arment is missing the painfully obvious, that Apple has been getting a ton of negative press, the likes of which they don’t normally ever see, thanks to their asinine review system and their poor behavior as a business partner. And that’s for the best, for App Store developers. It’s important to take off the Apple Fanboy bifocals long enough to look at this as a question of business relationships and investment risk.
Rather than fighting to abolish app review, it’s far more productive to guide and influence Apple, through both public and private interactions, to improve the system that we’re all, including Apple, probably stuck with for a long time.
Appeasement, or perhaps I should say bargaining with no chips, doesn’t seem very productive so far (is it ever?) Sure, it works well enough that popular developers like Arment have options for recourse; under the current system, if you are already a very popular developer with a wide audience, you can publicly embarrass Apple before that audience in order to get half-decent treatment as a business partner, adding value to their product and generating continued additional revenue for them.