[zenspider]

"He doesn't really mention in his post the fun fact that you've got to pay a fee so Apple can review/reject your app. Definitely not feeling warm and fuzzy about the investment so far."

You'd rather they get flooded with an absolute ton of crap? The fee isn't _that_ much and it separates the boys from the men, so to speak.

[ryan-allen]

We already are being flooded with absolute crap! The store is full of mostly toys and 'concept' apps. And to think you have to pay for some of those (remember the several incarnations of 'iPhone Flash Light' both paid and unpaid?). I hope Apple fail to dominate this area of the market as they treat both their end users and developers with the utmost disdain.

[thorax]

Nah, I'm not opposed to that, really. Ideally they'd have enough reviewers to handle that, though. A somewhat-non-profit like Mozilla handles it for Firefox extensions.

For us, the annoyance is just that we have to wait on them for multiple steps in the process when there's no guarantee they'll even post a produced app to the store.

We'll hedge our bets, though, and make a slightly useful app to see how annoying the process is, and wait for our larger app afterwards.

So far, we've been waiting over a week just to get into the program far enough to be able to legitimately put the app on our test iPhones. The app we're working on is worthless in the simulator, so to even debug it we need to get it on the phone itself. Waiting a few weeks to even debug your app is a bit demotivating. I whine here partly as a word of caution to anyone on a tight schedule.

[Protophore]

Wow, that's really dissapointing to hear, that you have to get approval for an app before you can even test it on your own phone.

Do you get the impression that this is actually a stage for them to keep out what they consider bad products or is it just a bandwith problem with their approval process?

[ashu]

Why not jailbreak? It's trivial, pretty much risk-free (you can always fully restore) and you are doing it only for testing this app -- and only until Apple approves you. You can at least make sure you get your app all debugged by the time other things fall in place!

[zenspider]

I'm thinking more like cpan than mozilla...

[jonknee]

The problem is they are denying apps that aren't crap and accepting ones that are. On top of that the App Store is the only way to sell your app, so if they deny your app you have no chance at success. If the app store were more like the music store and was a non-exclusive sales channel it wouldn't be that big of a deal.