Apple Roadblock
At the Apple Developers Conference last month it was mentioned that, at that time, 25,000 had applied to the iPhone Developer Program (to sign and ship apps) but only 4,000 people had been admitted. I am still waiting to be admitted and until then can only develop under emulation and not on a real device. I received an email 2 weeks ago saying my application is finally being processed but haven’t heard anything more.
Meanwhile, I have leads for work where people want to try new ideas on the iPhone. I also have existing clients asking if it’s worth developing an iPhone version - in many cases it isn’t worthwhile anyway due to the lack of being able to respond to phone events (background processes aren’t possible).
While programming with the SDK in the emulator, I have noticed there’s very little public information sharing on how to develop for the iPhone. For example, Cocoa Dev Central isn’t allowed to cover iPhone development. This is because the SDK is under NDA. Here’s a tip though. Most of the existing Cocoa/Objective C content is equally as applicable to the iPhone so just search on that if you want to how to do specific things.
The NDA is also annoying lots of other people. There’s even someone pleading with Apple to allow an iPhone programming book to be published. Meanwhile, developers (here and here) who have been accepted are having a hard time getting their applications updated on the iTunes App Store. It’s taking too long to get updates reviewed. End users are posting negative feedback on apps when they find problems and developers can’t provide updates quickly. In fact, they can’t even respond to end users’ concerns as the feedback is anonymous. Shozu have resorted to having a thread on their support forum trying to communicate back to people who have provided feedback.
While all this is frustrating, it’s an understandable consequence of Apple controlling the whole process. It shows that owning the complete solution brings with it a different set of scalability problems.
UPDATE 5 August: I finally got ‘processed’ and can now debug on the device.
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