Social networking sites are now a marketing medium. I did not view this link because the poster is simply trying to generate hype around his product.
There was a similar stunt on reddit involving advertising a pornography website. Someone posted that he had proof some site had sold his address to spammers when he signed up. Suddenly a porn site that no one has ever heard of had 1000+ votes.
Or the "This woman was fired from a bank because she was too attractive" Post where the article was simply a maxim style photo spread of the model
I'll probably get downvoted for this, but I'm curious when the "Apple is a dictatorship and I'm taking my toys and going home" blog posts will stop making it to the top of HN. Isn't this storyline getting a little monotonous?
I think the key thing to remember with these posts is that you never hear about when an app does get approved. From what I understand, and Steve Jobs stated at WWDC, it is very unusual to have an application rejected. Most times, its a simple fix too.
On top of that, there's HTML 5 based applications, which don't require approval. Half of these rejected applications could have been written in straight HTML and no one would have bothered them about an approval process.
HTML5 apps are not a valid replacement for native development. There are many device capabilities that are only accessible through the native development SDK, such as anything requiring access to various hardware, or that needs to integrate with data on the phone. Even if half the rejected applications could be written in HTML5, that still leaves the other half. I'm sorry, but that's not an acceptable solution. I should be the one to determine whether an app can run on my device, not my vendor.
I disagree (but that's not a reason to downvote in my book--writing something interesting enough to make me want to comment usually gets an automatic upvote).
Giving legitimate groups a legitimate voice on this particular forum is a way to keep some leverage against the Apples and Googles who feel like they can do whatever they want with your apps/accounts and don't have to answer to anybody.
An isolated blog about a developer in Italy (even a famous one) is not likely to be effective-- until it gets picked up here. Then you can be damn sure that important players are going to see it, and this can pressure a company to clearly explain itself or effect a remedy.
I understand this song is getting to be old, but we still need them on the site (and, if worthy, upvoted).
Is the purpose of Hacker News to "Act as a PR tool for forcing corporations to do what we want rather than doing what they feel is in their self interest?"
If so, I'm ready to write a blog post whining about how HN doesn't do what I want and why I'm going to stop participating. I read HN to find articles that "Gratify my intellectual curiosity." That especially includes "Posts about new and interesting phenomena."
Proprietary platform vendors doing stuff that is not in the best interests of one, a few, or even many of their symbiotic developers is not a new and interesting phenomenon, and I find nothing in this post that adds value to any discussion about the relative risks and rewards of sharecropping in the iOS ecosystem.
Nor do I consider "data" to be the plural of "anecdote." Seeing one, a few, or many such posts doesn't add value to a decision I might make about developing for iOS. The dynamics of business are such that people are far more likely to whine about how unfair Apple is than to publish how much money they're making. Likewise, a whine is far more likely to attract votes on a site like HN because of the emotional dynamics of link bait.
I have nothing against the post or the fact that it may be interesting to many people on this site. But that doesn't make it Hacker News as described in the guidelines:
Please don't submit comments complaining that
a submission is inappropriate for the site. If
you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it
by going to its page and clicking on the "flag"
link. (Not all users will see this; there is a
karma threshold.) If you flag something, please
don't also comment that you did.
Proprietary platform vendors doing stuff that is not in the best interests of one, a few, or even many of their symbiotic developers is not a new and interesting phenomenon
I find it interesting. Feel free to skip those articles.
Nor do I consider "data" to be the plural of "anecdote." Seeing one, a few, or many such posts doesn't add value to a decision I might make about developing for iOS
Cute and oft-cited phrase, often used as in "my sciene-fu is stronger than your sciene-fu," but it misses an important part of science: early phenomenological and empirical data are important to show people where to look. An anecdotal episode of anthrax being inhibited by bread mold indicates to the intelligent mind that there might be something worth pursuing.
When I see these articles I absolutely start looking in that direction for irregularities. I suspect a lot of us do.
Note the expression "_new_ and interesting." I find articles about JQuery programming interesting as well. That doesn't make them Hacker News, and that's why I don't post them here and then tell you to skip them if you don't find them interesting.
> early phenomenological and empirical data are important...
Whose case are you arguing here, yours or mine? Early suggests new. These posts are not new or early, they are old and I do not see anything new in this one. And again, this is not empirical data.
I welcome someone investigating the matter and posting data such as a comparison of the number of new apps in the app store to the number being withdrawn, the number of new android developers vs. the number of new iOS developers, and so on. I would find such things interesting and useful.
If there is something new or early in this post, please point me to it so I may retract my objection. My mind is open to the possibility that it adds something to the myriad of similar rants posted here and elsewhere in the last year or more, I just need someone to show me what it is.
p.s. I disagree with your conclusion with respect to this post, but still upvoted your reply. I agree that when such things present a new direction for investigation, they are Hacker News as I prefer it. But at the end of the day... I am only one person with an opinion on how to interpret the guidelines.
If you understand me and I understand you, then we've both done a good job, "mission accomplished." Thanks for taking the time to explain yourself clearly and civilly.
The blog posts will stop rising once a sufficient number of people figure out that trolling the App Store reviewers and getting banned, even temporarily, is a great way to generate free publicity.
Then the ratio of people crying wolf to legit complaints will grow and grow until we all get bored to death.
Can we please not use that phrase here? I hate it over at reddit, and I hate seeing it here even more. Just state your opinion, regardless of whether or not you feel like you'll be upvoted.
It's a bit of reverse-psychology that is meant to keep you from getting downvoted. More accurate would be "please don't downvote me for this" but that would also probably be less effective.
I'm pretty sure that that phrase actually does serve its intended purpose. I have nothing but a hunch and anecdotes to base that on though.
Since we aren't all standing in a room having a real conversation, the only way I can tell if people are going to agree or disagree with me is an up or down vote. "I'll probably get downvoted for this" is another way of saying "the predominant opinion here is x but i'm going to state y." My intent wasn't purposely to avoid downvotes (or get more upvotes,) but point taken.
> Since we aren't all standing in a room having a real conversation, the only way I can tell if people are going to agree or disagree with me is an up or down vote.
Apart from some tense confusion, yes.
> I'll probably get downvoted for this" is another way of saying "the predominant opinion here is x but i'm going to state y."
Yes, that is another way to say that. The point is that saying that gets annoying.
If you're about to say something for which you feel the need to apologize, don't say it. Double that if the apology is a pose. (No, it's not polite or "civil".)
The upvote/downvote arrows aren't for disagreement, they're for adds to the discussion/does not add to the discussion. That's the proper reddiquette at reddit as well. Unfortunately, it's generally ignored there, but Hacker News is usually better.
I stand corrected and surprised. I also note that underneath both of those posts are people saying that they disagree with this policy, both with more upvotes than PG. Perhaps it's best if the community agrees that downvotes should not mean disagreement?
This whole discussion is getting rather off topic though. Does someone want to make a meta-topic for this, or should we leave it alone?
No reason to downvote you as its an opportunity for education. Not just for you but for almost everyone on both sides of this debate distracted and not focused on the core problem. The root of this matter is the FCC rules which prohibit tampering with devices. The only devices the FCC seems to allow unlocking are "dumbphones". The smart stuff gets special protection by laws that were originally put in place for DRM and national security.
The U.S. is building economies around government sponsored anti-competitive measures. Apple along with just about every device manufacturer and cellular carrier petitions the FCC to keep these regulations in place.
A good chunk of Apple's current market value assumes the government will keep these rules in place. Without these rules, Apple's developer agreements and cut of app and ad revenue would be normalized by competition; real free-market competition. The longer we wait to address this core problem, the worse it gets and the harder it is to move away from. Can you imagine the calls a senator or FCC insider will get when this problem finally is forced on their agenda? The lobbyist for state teachers' unions will call to let them know that removing the protections may cause Apple shares to drop 35% causing the union's pension fund to lose $20 million overnight causing a cut in insurance supplements supplied by the union. Removing the protections would have incalculable network effects.
There's a scene in the 'Flaming Homer' episode of the Simpsons where Homer fights his way into Moe's packed-out bar to tell Moe he'll never drink there again, but Moe can't hear him over the noise of the cash register.
Soon after Moe's becomes popular because of the 'Flaming Homer' drink, Homer tells everyone about the drink's secret ingredient (cough syrup.) Nearly all restaurants in Springfield start serving 'Flaming Homers' and Moe's suddenly isn't the hot spot anymore.
Here's hoping all the "Homers" out there leaving the App Store take their knowledge elsewhere and bring some openness to mobile development.
I'm not sure you want to be the tail trying to wag the dog if your business plan is mobile app development.
Apart from an absolutely tiny fraction of the worlds population phone purchases are not driven on the apps you can buy. Out of that tiny fraction you then have to find the fraction that care about openness vs people who like to press a button and find the app just works.
With the fragmentation of open OS' on phones, app purchasing is going to become chaotic and frustating. Endless choice is not condusive to a good user experience, which is why the version of *nix that everyone (in a non-developer/hacker sense) raves about from a user point of view is the "closed" one (OSX).
that's uncorrect. Old applications will look the same (just using 4 pixels instead of 1), text and other standard elements will be rendered at the new resolution. If you make them at 640 x 980 they will just look better, but screen-ratio is the same, so no big deal. Also a one year cycle for new products is understandable and easy to deal with. Guess what, for the next year I know exactly on which devices I will work on. For Android every other day there is a new phone, with different specs, different UI layer and a lot of other differences.
I don't think it is an insurmountable obstacle. PCs had different screen resolutions for years, yet people still somehow managed to write web applications that looked good everywhere.
The argument as laid out may in fact be misleading, but the issue of fragmentation is not just screen resolution and memory differences, either.
It's at least also:
- display aspect ratio (far more important than resolution - worst case scenario with a "different resolution but same ratio" situation is that some things look more fuzzy than they ought to)
- OLED vs LCD (colors can look substantially different)
- hardware keyboard or not
- hardware buttons: which ones are available and where they are placed
- other hardware control availability / location / responsiveness - trackballs, non-screen touchpanels, etc
- sensor availability
- sensor quality: touch screen resolution and stability of tracking vary considerably
- how quickly OS upgrades are made available per device / vendor / carrier and how quickly they spread across the user population
- CPU speed
- GPU speed and capabilities
- different base applications installed with differing capabilities and UI appearance / feel
Some of these of course exist in iOS world too, though not a few of the most important ones and on many of the less important, there is much less variation.
One last note on iPad: few apps should have the same UI on phone-sized devices as they have on tablet-sized devices; if one is to include this as a count against iOS fragmentation, one has to also keep in mind that iOS device displays only come in 2 (radically different) physical sizes / aspect ratios whereas Android is intended to run on devices scaling from smaller screens than iPhone to larger than the iPad and everything in between. Which leads me to a question: iOS has a system-wide attribute that specifies whether the type of device is a "phone" or a "tablet"; is there a similar concept in Android?
BP: "Please stop the 'ecological disaster' oil spill argument. It's overplayed, sensationalist, and misleading when it comes to the situation in the Gulf."
No doubt it hurts when you can't deliver an application or feature for problems outside your sphere of influence, and it's even more frustrating when communication on the subject isn't occurring. Still, Apple never claimed that they don't maintain a monopoly on control of what's in the app store. The reasons for an application to be excluded don't have to be reasonable, they just have to be Apple's.
Appsfire signed up to play games in Apple's backyard. Someone should tell Appsfire then that no one likes the kid who takes his ball home when he doesn't like the rules.
As annoying as it must be for the developers of some of these apps, I have to wonder what they were thinking when they decided to make an app that so clearly straddles the line into duplicating app store functionality. I can't imagine taking that kind of risk with a business given Apple's history of rejecting and removing apps like this.
Another example that comes to mind is that Dashboard clone iPad app that was rejected a few weeks back (http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/09/dashboard-ipad-app-reject...). While it was cool, it was clearly the kind of app that would be very likely to be rejected even if it wasn't so flagrantly copying Apple's designs.
I'm not saying it isn't a shame that there are some categories of apps that I would love to have (say, a great podcast aggregator) that are simply too risky to make, and Apple should definitely have more transparent policies and a way to pre-vet an app idea, but if I were looking to spend 3-4 months working on an iPhone app, I might spend 2 minutes thinking about its chance of getting rejected first.
Ten minutes ago, I would have been behind this 100%. I'm an indie developer, and vie had more than my fair share of rediculous rejections.
However, I'm at WWDC. Ten minutes ago, I met with the head of one of the app review teams. She was kick ass, and gave me no-bullshit reasons why I was rejected, and told me exactly what I needed to do to get approved. Then she gave me her email and said if I get corporate BS again, escalate it to her.
The problem is that tens of thousands of apps are submitted a day and at that scale, mistakes are made. Either the reviewers are going too fast or they are crappy because there's a limited number of good QA people.
I used to think that apple's policies led to crappy spam apps because people weren't willing to invest the time and then get rejected. Now I understand that Apple is just as worried about this problem as I am, but just isn't sure how to solve it.
Well-intentioned people aren't always enough to make an effective system. If the end result has and continues to be shoddy then maybe there's only one way to vote -- with your feet.
I'd argue that with all the Apple talk about open standards, when not just open up the app store and then let users decide what is good/bad for the ecosystem. Why have a controlled environment. Why have a control on whether the user wants to shoot themselves in the foot.
Who cares? If you don't like the rules then just leave, go to Android, or Windows Mobile, or whatever but don't write some post about how it's a travesty like it's going to change Apple's mind. Just leave, and stop whining about it.
Pulling out of the App store is the new black. If you stick to Apple TOS (in most of the cases) you'll be fine. And when you play in the gray zone that's you get, I know because I've been there too. You decided to build your business on someone else platform, if you don't like it plenty of others to develop for.
55 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 121 ms ] threadThere was a similar stunt on reddit involving advertising a pornography website. Someone posted that he had proof some site had sold his address to spammers when he signed up. Suddenly a porn site that no one has ever heard of had 1000+ votes.
Or the "This woman was fired from a bank because she was too attractive" Post where the article was simply a maxim style photo spread of the model
On top of that, there's HTML 5 based applications, which don't require approval. Half of these rejected applications could have been written in straight HTML and no one would have bothered them about an approval process.
Giving legitimate groups a legitimate voice on this particular forum is a way to keep some leverage against the Apples and Googles who feel like they can do whatever they want with your apps/accounts and don't have to answer to anybody.
An isolated blog about a developer in Italy (even a famous one) is not likely to be effective-- until it gets picked up here. Then you can be damn sure that important players are going to see it, and this can pressure a company to clearly explain itself or effect a remedy.
I understand this song is getting to be old, but we still need them on the site (and, if worthy, upvoted).
If so, I'm ready to write a blog post whining about how HN doesn't do what I want and why I'm going to stop participating. I read HN to find articles that "Gratify my intellectual curiosity." That especially includes "Posts about new and interesting phenomena."
Proprietary platform vendors doing stuff that is not in the best interests of one, a few, or even many of their symbiotic developers is not a new and interesting phenomenon, and I find nothing in this post that adds value to any discussion about the relative risks and rewards of sharecropping in the iOS ecosystem.
Nor do I consider "data" to be the plural of "anecdote." Seeing one, a few, or many such posts doesn't add value to a decision I might make about developing for iOS. The dynamics of business are such that people are far more likely to whine about how unfair Apple is than to publish how much money they're making. Likewise, a whine is far more likely to attract votes on a site like HN because of the emotional dynamics of link bait.
I have nothing against the post or the fact that it may be interesting to many people on this site. But that doesn't make it Hacker News as described in the guidelines:
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That being said...
Mea Culpa.I find it interesting. Feel free to skip those articles.
Nor do I consider "data" to be the plural of "anecdote." Seeing one, a few, or many such posts doesn't add value to a decision I might make about developing for iOS
Cute and oft-cited phrase, often used as in "my sciene-fu is stronger than your sciene-fu," but it misses an important part of science: early phenomenological and empirical data are important to show people where to look. An anecdotal episode of anthrax being inhibited by bread mold indicates to the intelligent mind that there might be something worth pursuing.
When I see these articles I absolutely start looking in that direction for irregularities. I suspect a lot of us do.
Note the expression "_new_ and interesting." I find articles about JQuery programming interesting as well. That doesn't make them Hacker News, and that's why I don't post them here and then tell you to skip them if you don't find them interesting.
> early phenomenological and empirical data are important...
Whose case are you arguing here, yours or mine? Early suggests new. These posts are not new or early, they are old and I do not see anything new in this one. And again, this is not empirical data.
I welcome someone investigating the matter and posting data such as a comparison of the number of new apps in the app store to the number being withdrawn, the number of new android developers vs. the number of new iOS developers, and so on. I would find such things interesting and useful.
If there is something new or early in this post, please point me to it so I may retract my objection. My mind is open to the possibility that it adds something to the myriad of similar rants posted here and elsewhere in the last year or more, I just need someone to show me what it is.
p.s. I disagree with your conclusion with respect to this post, but still upvoted your reply. I agree that when such things present a new direction for investigation, they are Hacker News as I prefer it. But at the end of the day... I am only one person with an opinion on how to interpret the guidelines.
Then the ratio of people crying wolf to legit complaints will grow and grow until we all get bored to death.
Can we please not use that phrase here? I hate it over at reddit, and I hate seeing it here even more. Just state your opinion, regardless of whether or not you feel like you'll be upvoted.
I'm pretty sure that that phrase actually does serve its intended purpose. I have nothing but a hunch and anecdotes to base that on though.
Apart from some tense confusion, yes.
> I'll probably get downvoted for this" is another way of saying "the predominant opinion here is x but i'm going to state y."
Yes, that is another way to say that. The point is that saying that gets annoying.
If you're about to say something for which you feel the need to apologize, don't say it. Double that if the apology is a pose. (No, it's not polite or "civil".)
Respect the readers.
Before I say what I think might add to the conversation here's me talking about how I care more about my karma than the conversation itself.
It isn't something anyone but you cares about so why not just leave it out?
See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=392347
This whole discussion is getting rather off topic though. Does someone want to make a meta-topic for this, or should we leave it alone?
The U.S. is building economies around government sponsored anti-competitive measures. Apple along with just about every device manufacturer and cellular carrier petitions the FCC to keep these regulations in place.
A good chunk of Apple's current market value assumes the government will keep these rules in place. Without these rules, Apple's developer agreements and cut of app and ad revenue would be normalized by competition; real free-market competition. The longer we wait to address this core problem, the worse it gets and the harder it is to move away from. Can you imagine the calls a senator or FCC insider will get when this problem finally is forced on their agenda? The lobbyist for state teachers' unions will call to let them know that removing the protections may cause Apple shares to drop 35% causing the union's pension fund to lose $20 million overnight causing a cut in insurance supplements supplied by the union. Removing the protections would have incalculable network effects.
The FCC should allow application hacking eg. Android, but still restrict the baseband processor code as designed.
Moe doesn't even notice when he's gone.
Soon after Moe's becomes popular because of the 'Flaming Homer' drink, Homer tells everyone about the drink's secret ingredient (cough syrup.) Nearly all restaurants in Springfield start serving 'Flaming Homers' and Moe's suddenly isn't the hot spot anymore.
Here's hoping all the "Homers" out there leaving the App Store take their knowledge elsewhere and bring some openness to mobile development.
Apart from an absolutely tiny fraction of the worlds population phone purchases are not driven on the apps you can buy. Out of that tiny fraction you then have to find the fraction that care about openness vs people who like to press a button and find the app just works.
With the fragmentation of open OS' on phones, app purchasing is going to become chaotic and frustating. Endless choice is not condusive to a good user experience, which is why the version of *nix that everyone (in a non-developer/hacker sense) raves about from a user point of view is the "closed" one (OSX).
With iPhone first gen, 3G, 3GS, 4G, and the iPad - theres enough screen resolution and memory differences to make the same argument.
It's at least also:
- display aspect ratio (far more important than resolution - worst case scenario with a "different resolution but same ratio" situation is that some things look more fuzzy than they ought to)
- OLED vs LCD (colors can look substantially different)
- hardware keyboard or not
- hardware buttons: which ones are available and where they are placed
- other hardware control availability / location / responsiveness - trackballs, non-screen touchpanels, etc
- sensor availability
- sensor quality: touch screen resolution and stability of tracking vary considerably
- how quickly OS upgrades are made available per device / vendor / carrier and how quickly they spread across the user population
- CPU speed
- GPU speed and capabilities
- different base applications installed with differing capabilities and UI appearance / feel
Some of these of course exist in iOS world too, though not a few of the most important ones and on many of the less important, there is much less variation.
One last note on iPad: few apps should have the same UI on phone-sized devices as they have on tablet-sized devices; if one is to include this as a count against iOS fragmentation, one has to also keep in mind that iOS device displays only come in 2 (radically different) physical sizes / aspect ratios whereas Android is intended to run on devices scaling from smaller screens than iPhone to larger than the iPad and everything in between. Which leads me to a question: iOS has a system-wide attribute that specifies whether the type of device is a "phone" or a "tablet"; is there a similar concept in Android?
I couldn't resist the temptation to check the episode out, great memory!
That's not what "pulling out of the app store" means.
Appsfire signed up to play games in Apple's backyard. Someone should tell Appsfire then that no one likes the kid who takes his ball home when he doesn't like the rules.
Another example that comes to mind is that Dashboard clone iPad app that was rejected a few weeks back (http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/09/dashboard-ipad-app-reject...). While it was cool, it was clearly the kind of app that would be very likely to be rejected even if it wasn't so flagrantly copying Apple's designs.
I'm not saying it isn't a shame that there are some categories of apps that I would love to have (say, a great podcast aggregator) that are simply too risky to make, and Apple should definitely have more transparent policies and a way to pre-vet an app idea, but if I were looking to spend 3-4 months working on an iPhone app, I might spend 2 minutes thinking about its chance of getting rejected first.
However, I'm at WWDC. Ten minutes ago, I met with the head of one of the app review teams. She was kick ass, and gave me no-bullshit reasons why I was rejected, and told me exactly what I needed to do to get approved. Then she gave me her email and said if I get corporate BS again, escalate it to her.
The problem is that tens of thousands of apps are submitted a day and at that scale, mistakes are made. Either the reviewers are going too fast or they are crappy because there's a limited number of good QA people.
I used to think that apple's policies led to crappy spam apps because people weren't willing to invest the time and then get rejected. Now I understand that Apple is just as worried about this problem as I am, but just isn't sure how to solve it.
Let me turn that one around on you: given that the iOS platforms are massively popular wouldn't that mean that the end result is less than "shoddy"?
Who cares? If you don't like the rules then just leave, go to Android, or Windows Mobile, or whatever but don't write some post about how it's a travesty like it's going to change Apple's mind. Just leave, and stop whining about it.