Comment by lukifer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lukifer | Hacker News Reader

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I give them a lot of leeway because of this principle. But there's a lot of low-hanging fruit they've failed to grab:

- No way for small bug fixes to jump the queue.

- No way to pre-screen app concepts, so that the developer can get a rejection notice before doing the work.

- AFAIK, future releases are not routed through the same reviewer as previous versions, resulting in nonsensical rejections for previously existing characteristics.

- Again, AFAIK: No second pass for rejected apps, with an eye to the P.R. impact of the decision. I'm all for employee empowerment, but anecdotally, reviewers seem to make a lot of arbitrary decisions which the company backs with little examination.

- No feedback mechanism on your place in line. The wait would be a lot of more tolerable if I knew I knew how many days or weeks it should take, on average.

Simply put, Apple hasn't made developer relations a high priority, which is unfortunate; failure to do so in the 80s and 90s is part of what kept Macs in single-digit market share. iPhone may be king of the market now, but pissing off devs is not a good way to stay there.

I guess most people here don't write iPhone apps. Here's to clear things up where I can:

- No way for small bug fixes to jump the queue.

There is, you can get them in within a few days. Not immediate, but it helps a lot.

- AFAIK, future releases are not routed through the same reviewer as previous versions, resulting in nonsensical rejections for previously existing characteristics.

Not the same reviewer. But just speaking in general, this is also a positive point: if an app should really be rejected, but wasn't due to a lapse by a certain reviewer, it can still be rejected by another reviewer in another version. Makes sense. (well, you can say just skip the review process totally or enforce some way to make every reviewer have the same standard, but we know the world's not perfect, and we make do with what we have).

- No feedback mechanism on your place in line. The wait would be a lot of more tolerable if I knew I knew how many days or weeks it should take, on average.

Actually it's been months since they started showing the average number of days X% of updates wait (~2 weeks for ~98% so far).

And for the past few weeks, they have started showing the status for each update posted. ie. pending review, reviewing, rejected, etc.

- Simply put, Apple hasn't made developer relations a high priority, which is unfortunate; failure to do so in the 80s and 90s is part of what kept Macs in single-digit market share. iPhone may be king of the market now, but pissing off devs is not a good way to stay there.

This isn't right. Apple has handled developer relations very well for OS X app developers. From the outside, it almost looks like iPhone dev relations is handled by an entirely different group of people.

OS X didn't exist in the 80s and 90s.

Was referring to not handling developers well. OS X is around for about a decade.

But you reinforced lukifer's point instead of rebutting it. In the 80s and 90s (pre-OS X), Macs had crappy market share, and when they improved them (OS X timeframe), you saw much more developer interest.

Oh. There's a limit on thread reply depth?

Anyway, re: whopa, ah, I see what you mean now. I misread it as saying "Apple doesn't care about developers in general".

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