Apple Thoughts - News & Reviews on all things Apple

"When it comes to staff recruitment, loyalty and retention, it seems pretty clear Apple has the advantage - others may approve of their CEOs more or less as much, but Jobs is also the least disapproved of CEO, according to Glassdoor.com and BusinessInsider."

Just above his two closest CEOs in the approve category, and just below them in the disapprove category puts Steve Jobs in the lead. Interesting how close the Ballmer results were, I guess you either love him or hate him, there is no in between there.

"Apple is extremely protective of its trademarks, and has begun rejecting App Store submissions with "Pad" in the main title."

I could understand this if it was done from the beginning, however in one example called ContactPAD, they rejected not the original app but the update to the app. The app itself was accepted in the store and this was only the developers latest update that Apple rejected. I'd be frustrated too if I was a developer dealing with this type of inconsistency.

"Opera Software has submitted the iPhone version of its Mini browser to Apple for App Store approval, Opera said on Tuesday. That browser version was first shown at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February, and Opera has since worked hard at getting the product as much attention as possible."

In the past, apps have been rejected for duplicating functionality (which this would do) as well as for those not using webkit. But Tor Odland, Head of Communications at Opera thinks that it will be approved because "of the improved speed it offers compared to Safari and the fact that is already has 50 million users." I think he is kidding himself, why would Apple care if you had 50 million users? It certainly won't mean they will all become iPhone owners if they approve it. Matthew Miller over at ZDNet has some thoughts as to why Apple won't approve it, what are your thoughts?

"iPhone and now iPad Developers now have a more detailed way to see how app approvals are progressing. Apple added a clock a few weeks ago that displayed the percentage of apps approved within the last 14 days."

Any way that Apple can improve the developer aspect of the iTunes App Store is a good thing, but I'm not so sure how great this is for developers except in a general sort of way. The developers can see the percentage of new apps and updated apps that were approved within the last seven days, right now it stands at 98% and 99% respectively for them. Now if they made it so you could see how far along YOUR app was in the process that would be of greater benefit I would imagine. But kudos for Apple for improving the process in some fashion.

Apple really needs to get a handle on its approval process. Today we learned that after days of cajoling, Tweetie 1.3 was approved for the App Store. Tweetie is a full-featured Twitter client that allows you to even check out the trending topics on Twitter. The app was rejected because you could find profanity in the trending topics section, despite the fact that said section is generated dynamically from Twitter content. The irony, of course, being that Apple has thousands of songs that people would consider profane in the iTunes Music Store. Eventually, after an enormous amount of pressure, the app was approved.

The Amber Alert app, however, languished in approval limbo for what seemed like an eternity (It was actually about a month) until an uproar about how useful it was and a personal letter was written to Steve Jobs himself begging Apple to approve the app and explaining how they had worked with CMEC to build it. To this day, there's no explanation for the delay in the app.

These two apps demonstrate the one consistent failing in the App Store: the approval process. At every turn it seems to get more arbitrary and ridiculous, rather than more structured and common sense-based. Many times a developer has complained that they aren't sure they're willing to continue to develop for Apple if the app store doesn't improve for getting apps into the store and getting criteria that's more concrete than the whim of some underpaid dope who thinks that an f-bomb as a search result is grounds for denying an app.

Fix it, Apple, because it's starting to seem like the more broken it gets the further from being able to fix it we're going to be when it's all said and done. There's no way to look at that as a good thing.