3GS Launch Has Apple Way Behind on App Store Approvals

By all accounts, the iPhone 3GS launch has been a tremendous success for Apple. Despite launching in a down economy, the new model managed to sell as many units in its first weekend as its predecessor with little sign of slowdown. It’s also been an incredibly smooth launch. Though the iPhone 3G launch was marred by product shortages and buggy software, Apple’s kept a steady supply of hardware in the channel, and iPhone OS 3.0 is quite stable for such a new release.

But as effective as Apple has become in managing all of the aspects of the iPhone that it controls (hardware and first-party software), the launch also reveals the challenges the company faces in its efforts to take advantage of a larger network. AT&T’s signal strength continues to be a subject of much heated debate, and more crucially, Apple’s position as minder of a large software platform with thousands of developers looks increasingly untenable.

I don’t need to go into detail about the numerous cracks in the App Store facade of the last year: the baby shaking app, the unapproved porn, the copyright infringement, the excellent apps inexplicably rejected for arbitrary reasons and the apps that never made it out of the approval process one way or another. What I can say is this: the release of the 3GS has inspired a burst of app submissions the likes of which Apple has never seen before. When the App Store first opened a year ago, it had a flurry of submissions, but a smaller pool of developers. This is the first real “event” period since the iPhone dev community has grown, and the submission pool is not unlike the giant hyperwall of apps that dominated the conversation at this year’s WWDC.

A developer friend tells me that a pre-release version of his app was checked off and approved in a week in the period immediately before the 3GS announcement. The final release, submitted the day of the WWDC keynote on June 8, took nearly four weeks to get through the system, and I’m told that Apple has even notified its developer community that all apps are taking between three and four weeks to vet. That means it takes four times as long to get new products to consumers, four times as long to fix bugs, and four times as long to go from finished work to money-making.

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If Apple wants to maintain the dominance of the iPhone and the success of the App Store, it needs to find a more effective way to manage the sheer volume of submissions it’s tackling. Too much crud is making it through, and too much brilliant code is sitting on the shelf. The iPhone is by far the best mobile platform today. Unless Apple learns to treat its developers better on the front end (I hear payment works brilliantly), they won’t be loyal when the next Next Big Thing comes around.

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About the author

Pete Mortensen is a design strategist for consulting firm Jump Associates and the co-author of Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy, a book and blog that are significantly more interesting than you might initially think. Pete's particular Apple avocations are both around design--interface and industrial. Follow him on Twitter!

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Posted in iPhone, Opinions, Software |

Justin
Wouldn’t that have more to do with iPhone OS 3.0 than the 3GS launch though? A lot of developers had been waiting for push notifications to publish their apps, not for the 3GS.
rd4sndk
perhaps Apple should start charging more for app approvals. That would allow apple to add more staff which would speed up app release. It would also slow down the number of Zero cost apps.
Jon k
I think if Apple wanted to, they could devote more resources to the approval process. I mean, they’re sitting on like $30 billion in cash and have no debt. Raising prices would simply make things less attractive when the fault is clearly with Apple being ill prepared. I’m a student thinking of developing a few apps and of the cost went up, it would be that much more difficult for me.
Whab
Similar experience with my recent apps submission but not that bad: 3 weeks for an update, and 2 weeks for a new app. Both were submitted around iPhone OS 3.0 launch. Typical approval time was about 1 week before. I guess there was a huge rush of developers submitting compatibility updates for iPhone 3.0. I expect return to normal over the next few weeks. Overall I think Apple does a decent job, and that developers should better plan their release cycles and anticipate delays (Apple asks developers to update their apps a couple of months before the 3.0 release…).
http://www.cultofmac.com Pete Mortensen
You’d be surprised how few current apps actually have Push — developers tell me it’s a lot harder to implement than expected…
mark
iPhone 3.0 introduces many more things to check, and in this initial phase, Apple still needs to learn what they really need to look for and test. So a longer delay is to be expected.
Apple has spent the last year learning. And overall, with over 50000 submissions, the number of mistakes (including apps that haven’t made it through) seems to be quite low.
The simple solution is that Apple needs to keep doing what it’s doing, that is, adding more trained reviewers, and continuing to streamline and enhance the vetting process.
yet another steve
“Apple has even notified its developer community that all apps are taking between three and four weeks to vet”. I am a member of that community. Ten days after this article, I haven’t received any such notification, and believe me such notification wouldn’t a secret.
If Apple TOLD us this is would actually be a positive. We’re in the dark, just wondering, guessing, like rats in a lab experiment. One site says the average July approval is 6.x days! No one believes that.. conventional wisdom is 2 – 3 weeks… I’m at 19 days with not an hint of a word from Apple.
I know Apple cares (and can afford the staffing, though staffing up isn’t an instant process)… but the opacity of the process is driving some of us to complete madness!
Also, Apple should just accept that they’ll miss some things. They can always pull something later if it’s REALLY a problem. They need to balance that off against unfixed bugs and stifling innovation. (60,000 apps doesn’t mean 60,000 INNOVATIVE apps.. more like 59,500 SAFE me-too apps)