Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Software, Bad Apple, Developer, iPhone, App Store
Longtime mobile developer feels no love from Apple
Imagine you are a software development company that has been around for 11 years, with award-winning titles for mobile computing devices. You follow the rules, you submit iPhone versions of your applications to the App Store, and yet you still haven't seen your programs make it to the store.This is the boat that a lot of developers are in, but it is particularly frustrating for Ilium Software. Ilium has sold two well-respected applications -- eWallet and ListPro -- for Palm OS and Windows Mobile devices for years, and has a number of other commercial and free mobile applications on the market.
According to Ilium spokesperson Ellen Craw, eWallet has been "in the queue" at Apple for over two weeks, and they can't get any word from App Store personnel on when their highly anticipated app will actually appear online. The comments in Ilium's blog are particularly revealing, as longtime customers are also frustrated by the black hole at Apple.
Having used Ilium's products before, I'm waiting for both ListPro and eWallet to show up in the store to fill those niches on my iPhone. What other great products are being held up by Apple? We'd love to know!
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
Gene Cowan said 3:13PM on 7-18-2008
Apple needs to get all those Sudoku games, flashlights, and tip calculators up first. Priorities, people.
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APB said 3:23PM on 7-18-2008
SLINGBOX! SLINGBOX! Let it loose Apple!
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Charles said 3:26PM on 7-18-2008
I looked at screenshots of their "award-winning titles" on the Palm. Oh god, what ugly crap, one of the shots even has a miniaturized Windows Navigator. This is the sort of thing that Apple SHOULD drag its feet on.
Note to developers: Apple doesn't owe you anything.
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petsounds said 4:26PM on 7-18-2008
Note to Charles: if Apple wants to institute a quality control policy on apps, then they should publically set forth quality control guidelines. Otherwise there should be little reason for them to hold up any app, save for technical issues.
thekevinmonster said 4:38PM on 7-18-2008
Perhaps you should have:
a) looked at the screenshots of the upcoming iPhone application instead
b) looked at or used many Windows Mobile and PalmOS applications, especially those developed before they started trying to clone the iPhone touch interface, to see what users generally expect(ed) of those two platforms.
Darren said 3:33PM on 7-18-2008
The HP calculator emulators
http://code.google.com/p/hpcalc-iphone/
and an SSH client, for starters.
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Ryan said 3:38PM on 7-18-2008
"What other great products are being held up by Apple? We'd love to know!"
Hey, I know a great product being held up by Apple.
The iPhone!
I coulda sworn it came out on July 11th, but... Nobody at Apple or AT&T seems to know what I'm talking about. I even let them have $300 to call me if they see one, and they're still scratching their heads.
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CaptSaltyJack said 3:40PM on 7-18-2008
Ilium has sold two well-respected applications -- eWallet and ListPro -- **for Palm OS and Windows Mobile** devices for years
(emphasis mine)
Aha..that explains the delay. ;)
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Ryan said 3:48PM on 7-18-2008
This is why I can't stand Apple, cause they pull stupid stuff like this, and never even let the public know what is going on. At least a post by an apple press associate. They need to hire like 10 guys to just follow blogs, posts, etc and answer all these questions if they want to be successful. They still didn't even make a press release about the whole mess on Friday release date.
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KeynoteKen said 5:23PM on 7-18-2008
Successful as in selling over a million iPhones worldwide over a weekend or is this a new and vastly different kind of success you're talking about?
Ryan said 5:35PM on 7-18-2008
They are successful, I'm just saying people would love them even more if they were in better contact with their customers, etc. Ken, would you really call it a successful launch considering all the server issues they had? Sure they sold 1 million iphones (which is really in dispute still, some of those could be sitting on AT&T shelves btw) but they have a customer base of the whole world, and a ton of Hype.
It is frustrating to know stuff is going on, but without communication, its hard to understand why its going wrong. Even on the iPhone release day, just a statement from Apple saying 'Yes, the servers are too busy' would have been nice. Or 'Yes, we have bad estimates, and our servers couldn't handle the demand'. I guess they would rather people just rant and rave about it. I think if we knew reasons behind stuff, we would be a lot happier.
KeynoteKen said 6:29PM on 7-18-2008
It's really not about love, though, it's about money. If Apple made money on the worldwide sales of the iPhone, then it was successful.
There were people irritated, but there's ALWAYS going to be people irritated no matter what you do. Even with communication, those unhappy about the situation will just pick apart any release and people would rant and rave about how Apple wasn't prepared for the release. Seems that people were ranting and raving anyway without any form of a release, so, what difference would any release really make?
In two years, this will be forgotten and we'll need to Google for the details of what went on.
The Duck said 9:57PM on 7-18-2008
...if they want to be successful?
.
Bwahahahaha!!!!
jordan said 1:01AM on 7-21-2008
you are on an apple fanboy lovefest website for god sakes..
show me a website like this dedicated to microsoft..
James Donevan said 3:49PM on 7-18-2008
Can't imagine why Ilium is having a problem. They obviously have very shrewd collaborative and marketing skills as evidenced by this little PR push.
There is nothing better for getting your product quickly placed than publicly knocking the company that solely handles placement. It's an age old tactic. Always works. Just like adding lemon juice to milk.
They may make great software but they are lousy business people who will doubtlessly learn the hard (and slow) way.
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Devon said 3:52PM on 7-18-2008
Why should they get any priority over everyone else? Apple needs to fix this delay problem but just because the company made stuff for Palm or Windoze Mobile doesn't mean that they should get any special treatment over the rest.
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Corey J Feldman said 3:52PM on 7-18-2008
I don’t mean to sound unsympathetic, but come on… 2 weeks is not exactly an eternity considering the massive on onslaught Apple has received for the debut app store. People are unhappy because they don’t have control over distribution. Oh well, don’t develop for the iPhone.
Corey J. Feldman - Http://www.coreyjf.com/blog
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b1tr0t said 4:10PM on 7-18-2008
Dude! You were awesome in Lost Boys!
g_erhart said 4:39PM on 7-18-2008
Well, when it became clear that the "beta" period for the iPhone SDK was going to be very limited (4000 of 25000 applicants), the issue of fairness came up. Basically, you had two developers creating essentially the same application and Apple picked one to be in the beta then the other was left with only the simulator. On App store launch day, the one who was in the beta had a chance to get an "N" week head start on sales over the poor slob that got shut out. Where "N" is an unknown number, but probably bounded to the range of 2-5.
There are a bunch of pissed off developers (21000 perhaps!) that are feeling unloved by the limits of the current development and app store process. We can also hope that competition will keep the prices on applications low ... Apple has placed itself in the middle of this process for their "quality" purposes. The challenge for them is not to be so obstructive that developers get pissed off and bail.
Having used both Palm and WM devices for years I can say that the App Store is the best purchase/download experience I have had for a mobile device ... it would be a shame if they screwed it up.
KeynoteKen said 5:29PM on 7-18-2008
"the one who was in the beta had a chance to get an "N" week head start on sales over the poor slob that got shut out."
There were companies that had many weeks, months, YEARS head start on Apple regarding the whole digital music player. We've seen that a head start gets you nowhere if your product is week. If they've got a solid product, it'll outsell it's competition even if it comes out 4 weeks later.