Apple Offers App Developers Some Certainty

As someone involved in mobile application development, Apple's policies and practices regarding app development have always made me uncomfortable, as it has many, many others. One of the most unacceptable from a purely business perspective has been their app approval process. Not only has been little certainty whether, after you've put in your investment, they will permit your app onto their market (the only legitimate way to distribute to iPod and iPhone owners), you can never be sure it's due to some unwritten policy, the reviewer being in a particularly bad mood that day, or because your app may competitive with a current or future strategic initiative of their own.

Despite this dreadful uncertainty, Apple has been enormously successful in attracting a large stable of app developers, both small shops (including individual hobbyists) and some of the world's largest companies, many of whom are making a decent business of it. In other words, despite the criticism Apple had lots of reason not to make changes since their policy to this point has worked very well indeed.

Yet Apple is now officially loosening some of their more restrictive policies and coming clean on their app approval criteria. Uncertainty is one of those terrible things that can scare off any investor or businessman, so the change can only be a good thing. Less uncertainty means more predictability and less arbitrariness in those that might choose to develop apps for iOS products. As John Gruber says in his Daring Fireball blog:

**The existence of this document is a very welcome change, and it goes a long way to answering much of the criticism regarding prior controversial App Store rejections, by putting in writing the rules that are actually used by the reviewers.**

Regrettably the new policy is not public, only becoming available after you've paid your money and signed up to their developer agreement, which is not really as transparent as they ought to be. Of course this does not mean that it will not end up becoming widely available (there are far too many potential points of leakage), and in fact it already has. Apple's non-legalistic summary language is a fun read:

• We have over 250,000 apps in the App Store. We don’t need any more Fart apps.
• If your app doesn’t do something useful or provide some form of lasting entertainment, it may not be accepted.
• If your App looks like it was cobbled together in a few days, or you’re trying to get your first practice App into the store to impress your friends, please brace yourself for rejection. We have lots of serious developers who don’t want their quality Apps to be surrounded by amateur hour.
• We will reject Apps for any content or behavior that we believe is over the line. What line, you ask? Well, as a Supreme Court Justice once said, “I’ll know it when I see it”. And we think that you will also know it when you cross it.
• If your app is rejected, we have a Review Board that you can appeal to. If you run to the press and trash us, it never helps.

Of course the actual agreement text (including the above summary) goes into lengthy specifics, which you can find on the Wired site (hopefully this link remains valid for a while). Despite the disclosure of these criteria, Apple retains a great deal of latitude in rejecting apps, so there is no reason to believe that the situation will now be much different for many developers.

Still, it’s an important step. By publishing the guidelines, Apple mobile customers will be able to know what they can and can’t get on an iOS device versus, say, an Android phone. Also, third-party programmers will have a clearer sense of whether or not to invest in developing an app, whereas before they were subject to rejection without knowing what they weren’t allowed to do. However, some developers think parts of the guidelines could be more clear.

“By no means is what they put out today perfect,” said Justin Williams, developer of Second Gear software, who quit iPhone development last year. “There are some vague areas. But compared to where we were yesterday, it’s a big improvement.”

As some of the commenters on this Techcrunch article correctly note, the terms of service regarding use of user data continue to be a bone of contention. Privacy sounds good, and in general it is, there does have to be a balance between user privacy and reasonable commercial practices. This is an area where Google and other mobile ad companies had concerns with Apple since much of the sellable value of ad space is lost if the advertisers can't know as much about users as they can on other mobile platforms or on traditional web browsers.

I've gone and lost the link now, but Google did issue a statement that they can work with Apple's new policy on user data privacy. Presumably they believe that they have enough access to non-identifying user data to meet advertisers' needs.

Apart from my concerns about the practice as a user, I have also had concerns as a developer because of the personal data that mobile ad companies demand that Android app developers such as myself get from their users. For example, disclosing location and unique device identifiers to enable user tracking. I don't particularly care for this as either a user or as a developer, though I also know that most smart phone users are simply not concerned about it. The qualms come from not knowing how the advertisers or mobile ad distributers are using this data, while having to take responsibility for asking users to give their permission to disclose this data.

It is interesting to watch the different approaches taken on iOS and Android on user privacy and app approvals. I can't say that Apple is really out to protect users with their stronger stance on app and ad content. They have their own commercial interests in exploiting their control over the entire eco-system they control, but they also know that they must treat their customers better than they treat developers and advertisers if they are to retain their still dominant position in smart phones.

I have to wonder how much of their policy changes on app approvals, mobile ad services and 3rd-party app development tools has to do with their increasing comfort with the reins of control they enjoy or with the increasing thunder of the advancing Android army. The battle continues.