iPhone developer program acceptance faucet turned on

The "bitterness" is about the lies.

Apple *pretended* to be overwhelmed with applications to the developer program, when in fact they simply *played favors*.

Been with NeApple since the NeXT days, been doing NeXTSTEP nee Cocoa development on and off ever since. I'm a paying ADC Select member for YEARS.

So the first joke is that Apple charges $100 for the iPhone developer program on top of the $500+ ADC Select charges, without offering any additional value. A digital signing certificate which costs $0 to produce and only protects their product and control over the platform is hardly worth paying $100 for. The dev kit anyone can download (which is GOOD), even in beta form, so there's no value either.

The iPhone 2.0 platform will be hacked faster than they can get mobileMe up and running.

So the only value in the sign up was to be able to be there from the start, because by and large, unless you have tons of marketing muscle (read money), the first app to occupy a space will rule the market, unless you have something that's at least 10 times better, and that's a tall order.

So no, this is not about a $.99 flashlight app. Heck, I'd be ashamed to charge anything for that, it's not more complicated than any hello world demo.

It is however about a ridiculously overpriced fee to gain access (the ADC Select membership at least gets you hardware discounts and tech support incidents as well as a monthly mailing), it's about a meaningless fracturing of the developer space (iPhone developer vs. Mac developer, when all we should be is simply an Apple developer, it's the same friggin' OS after all), and it's about Apple lying to its developers about the reasons for the delay, when they simply wanted to give some people with a good line to Apple's HQ preferential treatment.

Worse: if at least they had made sure that only decent stuff would make it there, there would have been a point. But how many flashlight apps, to get back to that, do you find on the AppStore? Not only are these a joke to charge for, there is also more than one of these useless apps.

Given your Apple apologetic stance, you're either a fan boy, or selling the $0.99 flashlight app, and are happy that you can milk that market for a while, until people figure out that just opening Mail produces just about the same amount of light.

In terms of real business, these delays are seriously harmful: try to get funding for a project when you can't even tell if and when you might get approved for iPhone developer status? 6 months head start is a massive advantage.

thedude, what did Apple tell you about the way you registered? I got the same problem, my Country isn't listed, may I use the US store to pay, and do that kind of things or when you spoken to them they tell you there was another way?

Hi Dan,

Have you find solution for completing Developer Program enrollment?

My country also isn't on that list, and I didn't receive any answer from support.

I ended up joining using the online system on the U.S. Apple store by using a U.S. credit card of a company I'm doing consulting for. This has actually caused me no end of trouble, since they now have my name wrong and I'm unable to submit my app to the App Store and have been waiting for a week for them to get back to me about this problem. Apparently they're quite flooded with support requests so it's no wonder they are taking their time getting back to you. I believe you will hear from them eventually, I did hear back after a few days regarding my request to join from an unsupported country but by then I was already in. One thing that seems to speed things up is if you call them over the phone rather than email. You can find the support numbers at this URL: http://developer.apple.com/contact/phone.html . Be prepared to wait for over 30 minutes though, at least for the U.S. number. (And they don't answer during the weekend.) Good luck, hope this helps, Dan

Oh yeah, and to add insult to injury, we're supposed to pay $100/year on top of the $500/year that the ACD membership costs. Exactly WHAT are we paying that for? There's no support or iPhone hardware or anything included, so we pay for the honor of improving Apple's product line up. That's about as bad as paying for a T-shirt with advertisment on it....

You haven't seen my *fleshlight* application yet. I'm gonna be rich!

I couldn't agree more, it is GOOD we don't have any kind of control from Apple. The guys charging 5-10 bucks for flashlights will soon disappear, same thing happens on ANY platform, is just that they are much more visible now.
Also, I looked for an rsa token generator for winmo for years, and couldn't find anything good (I want the server too, a complete open source solution)... I don't see it coming to the iPhone.