Sole Engineer Behind iOS Remote App Working On Other Projects At Start-Up-Like Apple

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Make me put a plump thumb on my favorite iOS app and the Remote.app icon will soon be coated with a greasy, opalescent print of my epidermal ridges. For those of us with a constabulary of Airport Expresses, the freely downloadable app singlehandedly turns our networked homes into the equivalent of a far more expensive Sonos setup.

Unfortunately, Remote.app hasn’t been updated in months… which prompted Gizmodo to raise a plaintive cry as recently as last week. What’s the hold up? It hasn’t even been updated to natively support the iPad, let alone the iPhone 4.

As it turns out, Remote.app is the product of a single engineer who has since been moved to other projects, according to Posterous CEO Sachin Agarwal.

“Apple doesn’t build large teams to work on every product they make. Instead, they hire very few, but very intelligent people who can work on different projects and move around as needed,” writes Agarwal.

Agarwal stresses that despite being one of the biggest companies in tech, Apple is run in many ways like a start-up. Apple’s internal structure is run with a focus on small, flexible teams, and engineers between MacOS and iOS move back and forth between projects as needed.

It’s an interesting illumination upon Apple’s mysterious internal culture… but we have to wonder: what is the developer behind Remote.app working on right now that’s so pressing he can’t take a day or two to bump at least the resolution of the software up to post-iPad spec? If Agarwal’s comments about engineers shifting between OS X and iOS as needed, Apple might well have a doozy of a 10.7 update to show us this January.

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