After submitting a minor .1 bug fix for Airfoil Speakers Touch 1.0.1 [Free - iTunes link] for iPhone and iPod touch, longtime Mac developers Rogue Amoeba waited for what they assumed would be a routine App Store review. Three and a half months, three rejections, and the unsuccessful intervention of a champion at Apple, the app is finally in the store, but the developer has decided the process is too odorous to continue with the iPhone platform.

Don’t stop us just because you’ve heard this before over and over again.

The issue this time was Rogue Amoeba discovering the type of Mac and exact application that was being used as audio source, and displaying the corresponding Mac OS X-provided image of the machine and icon for the app.

Though standard — intended — behavior on the Mac, Apple’s App Store policy branded this a trademark violation and they requested it be changed. Rogue Amoeba assumed the request was erroneous and tried resubmitting, tried escalating via email, even had a champion inside Apple try help get it through. In the end, the App Store policy was an immovable object, and Rogue Amoeba had to remove the Mac and app icon images. Airfoil Speakers Touch 1.0.1 was then approved and placed in the app store.

(And during the whole process, Airfoil Speakers Touch 1.0, buggy as it was, and using the exact same artwork Apple had issue with in 1.0.1 was left untouched in the App Store for users to download and use).

In the future, we hope that developers will be allowed to ship software without needing Apple’s approval at all, the same way we do on Mac OS X. We hope the App Store will get better, review times will be shorter, reviews will be more intelligent, and that we can all focus on making great software. Right now, however, the platform is a mess.

The chorus of disenchanted developers is growing and we’re adding our voices as well. Rogue Amoeba no longer has any plans for additional iPhone applications, and updates to our existing iPhone applications will likely be rare. The iPhone platform had great promise, but that promise is not enough, so we’re focusing on the Mac.

Add our voice to the chorus: fix. this. More after the break…

While many of these developers point to Apple acting as App Store gatekeeper as the issue, we’d submit right now the actual issue is Apple continuing to act as a capricious, illogical, unpredictable, often stupefying gatekeeper.

Curating a store is just a business model. It may well cost them developers philosophically opposed to the idea, even incredibly talented ones like Facebook’s Joe Hewitt, but every decision has an opportunity cost. Choosing to curate a store, even one growing so fast it has 2 billion downloads and 100,000 apps, and continuing to suffer from poor communications, overzealous legal oversight, unclear guidelines, and the crap shoot that seems ultimately at the core of any given app getting approved on any given day… it just doesn’t work.

Getting rid of the gatekeeper might treat the symptom but is it the cure? Apple legal could just as easily issue a DMCA demand notice for an app using artwork they felt was a trademark violation, and have it taken down — even under Google’s more open, publish-first, investigate-if-flagged App Market system. The problem is Apple shouldn’t think using that artwork is a problem on the iPhone if it isn’t on the Mac. That, and the dozens of other so-obvious-it-hurts-our-brains-issues, are what needs to be fixed, and what are driving developers to question the platform.

Like Palm, Apple could allow developers to skip review entirely, leave them off the storefront, but give them a direct download link to market and distribute on their own. That wouldn’t fix this issue. They could extend Ad-Hoc to infinity so there’d be no update notification or over-the-air (re)downloads, but developers could make binaries available themselves and users could drag and drop them into iTunes to install, along with beefy warning flags for “unapproved apps”. They could create those $999+ “pro” developer accounts, along with dedicated App Store point-of-contact and accelerated review process (levels of partnership program exist on many other platforms and in many other businesses).

Or Apple could just spend some of that 35 billion on hiring a legion of reviewers (rather than just 40ish), training them to the standards of Apple Retail, creating a second team dedicated to communicating with developers, and third team focused solely on whatever tiny percentage of cases, like the one above, spiral out of control.

Yes, Apple is making incremental improvements like email escalation and better review status messages, but every step forward always seems to be met with an equal and opposing step back.

2 billion downloads, 100,000 apps — Apple touts the growth and size of the App Store in press releases, they need to start respecting that size in practice. Observably respecting. It shouldn’t take a champion inside Apple. It shouldn’t take emails from Apple Marketing SVP, Phil Schiller. It shouldn’t take an open letter from Steve Jobs. (Though it might help restore some developer confidence at this point). It should just work, and Apple needs to invest whatever they need to invest at this point to make it work.

Paul Kafasis, who along with his fellow Rogue Amoeba’s raised some early concerns over the iPhone SDK, is back with a post WWDC status report, and his current opinion? Brokended.

After a month of waiting, with no contact from Apple save form letters that went out to all developers, we’d grown quite frustrated. We don’t know if we should invest our time in a platform for which we may not even be allowed to release software. Finally on April 8th, one of our developers decided to apply to the program as an individual, to see what would happen. Shockingly, in under 24 hours he had a certificate which enabled him to work on actual hardware.

Kafasis thinks that Apple is handling individual applications separately from — and for some reason much faster than — company applications, which he finds confusing given the possible impact of large development houses and the only real (and critical) differentiator of the $99 program acceptance being the ability to tether and test actual hardware (rather than simulators) and, of course, the ability to sell through the App Store. Ultimately, he believes the problem lies in Apple’s communications — not only its lack of clarity, but its complete lacking (almost a trademark of the tight lipped company).

iPhone dev expert extraordinaire Erica Sadun follows up with some analysis of her own:

25000 applied; 4000 admitted. By any stretch of the calculator, thats only about a 16% acceptance rate. It’s one that has left many independent OS X developers behind.

Was Apple overwhelmed by the sheer volume of applications? Have they botched the program from the get go? And what could they do now to help get developers (and their developments) back on track?

Rogue Amoeba (developers of such acclaimed apps as Audio Hijack and Airfoil) have been putting up a great series of blog posts on topics such as code signing and app restrictions, as well as a very interesting list of “bugs” submitted to Apple on the SDK.

First up, Mike Ash provides a breakdown of code-signed apps (applications which must be cryptographically signed by a developer and authorized by an authority — in this case Apple — in order to run), pro and con: better security and accountability vs. single point of control:

The most worrying one on the list [of disallowed apps], of course, is “Unforeseen”. This is basically a catch-all intended to give Apple an out in case anything comes up which they don’t feel like letting onto the device. Maybe some new class of evil app is developed which doesn’t quite fit into the above categories and Apple needs to block them. Or maybe Apple just doesn’t feel like having any competitors in a particular market, and wants to shut them all out.

Next, Quentin Carnicelli lays out why Apple needs to go “Back to the Future” and remember how it was a 3rd party dev, and not Apple itself, who helped fix core problems on the Mac:

When Steve Jobs first saw Switcher, his reply was: “It’s great. Apple is going to bundle it with the Mac. Congratulations.” Andy had writen a innovative application that improved the platform for every single user from there onward. Fast forward to today, if he had an iPhone instead of a Mac, it would have been legally impossible for him to do so. This is no mere hyperbole – the SDK agreement expressly forbids using non-public APIs, attempting to touch other applications, and running in the background, among other things.

Lastly, Paul Kafasis shares the iPhone SDK bugs Rogue Amoeba has filed with Apple to date, including feature requests for non-iTunes app delivery, multitasking, root access, Media-Picker for music and video, file-system access, host computer access, VoIP over EDGE, Dock access, and asks others to do likewise:

If you have an ADC account, you can submit your own bugs at http://bugreport.apple.com. Plenty of things are still in flux, and with input from users and developers, Apple may just see what a powerful platform the iPhone can be.

Rogue Amoeba isn’t sure they like Steve Jobs all dressed up in his dear leader robes . What do you think? Will Apple create an iPhone user-topia? Or does app-solute power corrupt?

(via DaringFireball and TUAW)