Apple to iPhone developers: Please make your apps less useful
Apple strikes again. Normally, when an iPhone/iPod touch app gets updated it's good news. Woo hoo — new features, new fun! iStat users who updated their app to the latest version that became available this afternoon however …
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple's treatment of third-party developers has been a running friction point since launch season: mobile builders were complaining within a week of the 2007 iPhone launch disappointing them, and by that fall TechCrunch was urging Apple to stop thinking like a phone company. Today's episode fits the pattern — Apple required the latest iStat update to ship without its new useful features, confirmed on 2009-08-27.
What makes this one land harder is timing: it comes days after an analysis pegged the annual value of the iPhone app economy at more than $2.4 billion, and the same day Apple confirmed it approved Spotify's long-watched iPhone app after a closely scrutinized review — showing the gate can open for headline names even as utility-app makers get trimmed back.
First-order effects
- iStat users who installed today's update get an app stripped of its advertised new capabilities, while the iStat developer ships a deliberately reduced product after doing the full build.
Second-order effects
- Developers of similar system-monitoring and utility apps now have to price Apple's review discretion into their roadmaps, holding back or abandoning features they cannot be sure will survive approval.
Third-order effects
- If trimming updates becomes routine, Apple isn't just moderating individual apps — it is acting as the arbiter of what the $2.4-billion-a-year app economy is allowed to do on its own platform, a structural power developers have flagged since 2007.
The trend: Apple's App Store review is hardening from a security filter into a capability gatekeeper, deciding feature-by-feature what iPhone software may do.