Apple you hurt me so much that you won't let me say

Source: Internet
Author: User
Tags creative commons attribution apple apps

Editor's note: This article is from medium, the Chinese version is compiled by Heaven Zhuhai Branch Rudder. As a seasoned application developer, the author is deeply hurt by Apple's application audit mechanism, like Thorn. The original text in this paper has been in just a few days in practice to obtain 523 recommendations, it can be seen that the text shout out the voice of the user. And in the domestic, this article has also been published after the donews and Tiger sniff the headlines, it can be seen that the domestic issue is also very important, the following people together to reward.

It's time for us to stand up and denounce the Apple App Store review process.

Apple claims that they are reviewing the application process to "ensure that they are reliable, running on schedule and not containing offensive content." "But in reality the process is both slow and autocratic. In general, the review process does not cost you 7 days of time is unlikely, many people even a few weeks. If there is a need to communicate with developers on the audit rules, it will take longer. In a way, the results reveal that Apple's rules are ambiguous and overly broad. Some seemingly perfectly reasonable applications may end up failing to pass the audit. This inefficient and low-quality application audit mechanism is hurting users and developers.

Two damage caused by inefficient audit speed

too slow auditing can in turn compromise the reliability of your application .
In the real world, it is impossible for developers to thoroughly test all the boundary conditions that could cause our application to crash. Fortunately, once one of our apps is put on the market, we can get feedback from the end user. But when we solve the problem based on user feedback, the solution version needs to be dormant for at least one weeks in the queue waiting to be audited. The end user of the application spent several weeks struggling with the old version of the problem, and it was not easy to wait until the developers had solved the problem, and the new version was detained by Apple for reliability checks. Apple has provided a patch review process specifically for the new revisions, but this is just as much of a disappointment for their users as it will take more than a day to simply add a new feature to the audit time.

One might argue that if developers knew that the time needed to wait for their changes to be released was so long, they would be more cautious about these changes to ensure their correctness. This may be true to some extent, but to know that there is no software that has no bugs in the world, it should be clear that the more you tread on a change, the easier it will be to cause another problem.

Slow review process slows down the pace of innovation.
The mainstream sites we see today basically release small updates every one or two days, a manifestation of efficiency and rapid adaptation. Instead of Apple, it has dragged all the companies and developers that have developed software on its platform into its release style, which is still in the 90 's, so that the fast iterations that are prevalent today are chatty. If all the sites are like apples, only the normal 1/7 or 1/14
Iteration speed, what is your favorite website now likely to evolve into today's?

Special audit rules make the situation worse

Apple prides itself as a judge of taste and speech .
Consider if you want to buy a car, but the other person tells you that the car is not allowed to drive to a strip club, or you are going to buy a TV, but this TV is not allowed to play Fox News Channel. So now you realize that we are actually following the rules imposed on you by a company with a market share of up to 40 percent? When you think of the great camera feature, you accidentally choose Apple's mobile platform, which means that you will be completely imprisoned in the other side of the view imposed on you. We all have parents, and we all have the right to vote with our feet, but Apple uses "to shut out any application that has the presence of a public person's avatar or over-exposed skin" above all of the rights we have mentioned above, and it is called to protect the user. In addition, Apple has some other similar provisions, such as the application can not have a recruitment theme, not even the information of legitimate marijuana, no gun pictures, no search engine, do not adopt the drones application (Editor's note: Apple's veto on drone drones application is not a overnight thing anymore, Interested people can read this article: http://www.csdn.net/article/2013-01-05
/2813441-apple-censors-drone-strike). Jobs once argued that he was providing us with true freedom and freedom from pornography. Apple declares:

"If you want to judge a religion, write a book." If you want to describe sex, write a book or a song, or create a medical application. It can be complicated, but we decided not to allow certain types of content to appear in the Apple Store ... We will reject any application that contains cross-border content or behavior. “

But you know, application is a very powerful form of communication between contemporary humans, and as developers of these applications, we should have enough freedom to express our views.

Apple's audit rules put Apple itself on top of users .
The best example here is the limitations of the app's internal purchasing capabilities. To think that Apple has gone to the head of money, because the internal purchase function can not give it 30% of the revenue and prohibit the appearance of the feature, so that users can not buy books on the Kindle app or the YouTube app can not buy video, and in the comic app can not buy comics, And while these features are absolutely no problem on Android. In the early days of Apple's App store, Apple's refusal to include an app was simply because the apps had a competitive relationship with Apple's own built-in apps. Apple's attitude problem is well known, for example, that it share in applications sold from developers as a sounding "Apple sends money to developers", and in fact it should be "developers earn their income through their labor, and Apple abruptly a slice of it."

Apple's audit rules are too subjective and execution is not strong .
A software from the first version of the beginning, there are a lot of problems are unavoidable, so we need to constantly solve the problem and fast iterative release. But maybe the auditor will post your app to reject it because he doesn't understand your application in his professional eyes, or you'll suddenly notice that you need to add some extra statement, or brush your app down because you didn't follow the call method of Apple's TouchID API. These rules are so vague: the app in the store has to be bug-free, hidden, and must have lasting value--this kind of generalities is equivalent to clean sweep all things in the same way, let your Apple decide. Apple's grievance process is also slow and fraught with uncertainties, so developers can only wait and pray. So we look at the Apple Store is still full of bugs and insecure applications, if the Apple audit really requires no bug, this is not to beat their own mouth it? Where exactly are you going to review the criteria? Apple's vague answer to their review clause is, "when you touch nature, you know where our standards are."

The original reason for Apple's existence and development is that its founders grew up in a world where any developer anywhere can write apps to any user anywhere, and developers and users do not need a matchmaker to take the lead. Do you remember how Apple boasted of freedom in 1984 's famous Apple commercials. But now you can see the fact that Apple stands on the opposite side of freedom, and is on the curb, pushing the power of centralization to limit how users can use its devices under its rules. Anyone who has ever been to a programming marathon should be in this situation, and your app will be available for download on Android on the day of the marathon, and on Apple's iOS platform, sorry, you just have to wait one weeks, so if you want to play a programming marathon, Please don't think about playing on the Apple platform. So, behind the Apple's smooth animations and shiny, thin look, I see that we're walking in a dark way.

Anger is justified.

Recently the media has been a lot of other control and anti-control of the smoke has consumed a lot of ink, such as the Battle of Amazon vs. Hachette, TimeWarner vs CBS, Verizon vs. net neutrality, Google vs Yel P's contention. Now maybe it's time to brush up on the Apple Store keeper. This door is still one of those doors. You can only enter the Forbidden door (Editor's note: The author wants to say: Once you become an Apple user, there are too many rules imposed on you, so you will have a high degree of dependence on its platform. When we are too dependent on one thing, it is often difficult for us to escape from it. , and the gatekeeper's only reason to shut the door to developers is because of their independence and complacency, which is even worse than being rejected by the bottom of the revenue.

Many of us are worried that our criticism of Apple's rhetoric will lead to retaliation. Incredibly, Apple has indeed written a threat like: "If your application is rejected, you can make a complaint to our audit Council." To tell you the truth, it's no avail that you went to the press to attack us. "If Apple does impose penalties on developers for public comment, who can we appeal to?" And there are others who are captured by Apple's beauty and can turn a blind eye to Apple's irrational offensive behavior.

Improvement recommendations

Is it really so hard for Apple to use its vast resources to automate audits or hire more people to speed up the review process? (You see, Google has done the application of the audit near real-time speed, and the world has not so the end of the arrival AH)

A better approach is to loosen the limits of app content auditing for Apple. Why not let the user decide whether the app makes people nauseous? Is the app useful? Is the app too many bugs? Instead of your Apple actively volunteered to be our nanny. Another thing is that Apple has put its own apps whitelisted in a conspicuous position for the user to find the fastest, and the app that our developers write must be searched by users or connected to find them.

Consider further improvement of the testflight, so that you can more easily release the beta application, without affecting the normal audit process, so that users do not have to wait for a lengthy review process to get the test version of the app to experience, Similar to this practice in the early days of Android has undoubtedly been provided to the user.

Besides, I'm not going to give any more specific solutions. But the problem lies ahead, and we look forward to Apple and everyone working together to solve the problem. Sometimes I even hope that all the mainstream application developers will join together to put the app on the Apple Store for a day to put pressure on Apple to tell Apple that the damage they have caused to us by this slow review process is not negligible. If I had written this article when I was in the company, it would have been tantamount to writing a letter of resignation to the company, but now that I have left the company, my remarks should not have harmed any of the previous companies. As a developer of Apple apps, I think it's very necessary for me to talk about the damage that Apple's audit system has brought to all of our developers, and that's why this article was born.

Postscript

After I pushed this article to Twitter, I soon received a lot of feedback that seemed to be worth discussing, and here I listed some of them and responded to them.

1. "The Apple Store is still very useful, and you can see that the other stores are riddled with crashes and malicious software."
-Apple's review process is certainly not useless to protect users and developers, but at least according to my many years of application development and usage experience, the idea of a large number of applications prone to crashes and malicious behavior on Android is exaggerated.
-It is difficult to provide credible textual research to prove which platform is more stable in application.
-The current slow review process is far more than necessary to keep the store neat and inviting. Measures such as the introduction of audit automation and the provision of white lists to good developers are a good way to improve on other platforms such as Android.
-You can't always make threats to developers because developers are openly critical of you.

Freedom does sometimes lead to more confusion than control, but don't forget that control is just a process, and ultimately our ultimate goal is to move towards freedom.

2. "The user chooses the Apple product, and no one is forcing them with a gun."
If users know that the app in the Apple store doesn't even make jokes about political figures, how much do you think the Americans are willing to buy the iphone, according to American liberal ideas? And how many of you think that the iphone and other smartphones offer similar functionality and still choose to buy them?

When choosing an iphone, the user will not be aware of how much trouble it will bring to developers by the apps he chooses to use in the Apple Store, which in turn will impact the quality of the app users use.

3. "It sounds to you that this guy doesn't really know what's going on."
Truth speaks louder than eloquence. This article is in my years to develop a lot of popular applications in the process of thinking about the crystallization, you can also go to other peers big company developers inquire, see if they are not the same view. If you have any questions, you can go to my Twitter to see a lot of comments, of course, if you like, you can also comment on the above.

After the publication of this article, I received a netizen sent an article "Apple to openly criticized the developers of the threat of speech" (Editor Note: I will plan to provide the Chinese version of the article, please everyone in this site or I look forward to the public number), the article in Hacker News obtained the highest " Heartbreaking "level rating," I'm a developer of a 17-year-old Apple app. Apple's App Store is too opaque to be secretive.

Just like a bottomless black hole, I dropped my application's modifications to the black hole, often as if it were a sink, without any echoes and no control. Apple decides when I'm going to be rewarded and decides when my app will be uprooted overnight, and as a developer I don't know about it. ”

4. "You should have laughed for Apple to build this app store, without which your app can cover so many people?" "
Can't we just be a white-ugly one because the Apple store is doing a good job? Besides, aren't you going to compare the Android store with more users on the Internet? In this case, you don't have so much control over the rules of your Apple, why don't you say it?

Finally, perhaps everyone deserves to think carefully about what is reasonable and necessary.

Reminder : More related articles will please pay attention to the public number:Techgogogo or official website www.techgogogo.com, of course, also very welcome you direct (zhubaitian1) Rudder Master I interact.
Copyright : This work uses the [Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 China Edition license], if not authorized, forwarding do not delete the following contact information, otherwise held responsible. This article is the first idonews column.

Apple you hurt me so much that you won't let me say

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