Infinite Loop / The Apple Ecosystem

Company halting iPhone app work after long approval delay

FreedomVoice submitted its Newber application for App Store approval more than …

Apple's procedures for reviewing and approving iPhone and iPod touch applications are still a bit mysterious. Indeed, over the last several months, we have heard many sordid tales of App Store rejections and delays. Wired has the details of the latest saga, which involves a company called FreedomVoice and its Newber application, which can transfer calls between your iPhone and other phones. FreedomVoice submitted the application to Apple for approval over six months ago, but the company still hasn't heard anything back. As a result, it is discontinuing work on Newber, despite the fact that the application has cost the company some $600,000 so far.

There are certainly concerns with the way Apple handles the App Store approval process and they way it communicates with developers. When a business model is tied to the capriciousness of one company, however, delays are part of the risk you take. Developers know before entering the process that this type of thing may occur. We are not totally heartless, though; six months is a ridiculous amount of time to wait for approval. The fact that the company hasn't heard anything in that time is even more egregious, so we hope they're able to get some answers about what happened.

Still, some of that $600,000 was spent on marketing despite the fact that the application hadn't been approved yet. For example, FreedomVoice spent $50,000 on a booth at CES before approval. Most developers aren't dropping that much cash on pre-launch marketing, but it does seem to be a bit of a trend these days. (We get quite a few e-mails to the Infinite Loop mailbox promoting software that hasn't yet received Apple's blessing.) Developers want some buzz as soon as applications are available to the public, but too much early PR can be a bit of a risk.

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16 Reader Comments

  1. Android. Need I say more?
    40 posts | registered
  2. wow, i thought 3-4 weeks for approval was bad. It would suck to have to go through what they go through.
    31655 posts | registered
  3. This sounds like either extremely poor management on the company's part or a deliberate attempt to rile up the tech press as a negotiation/pressure tactic with apple. It's not like this wasn't a well-known part of the app store business model. To have not accounted for it on this level is either disingenuous or incompetent.
    1727 posts | registered
  4. I'm doing this for 4 months already.

    It took 2 months to join the program (they lost my faxes, then wait 1 month to deduct the 99 USD from my credit card - no iTunes payment in Hungary).

    And now i'm sitting in the approval queue since January.

    4 months overall and still nothing.

    This is the app:
    6 posts | registered
  5. I'd have to re-grok the NDA and all the legal stuff, but I'm thinking an app that transfers calls... is probably breaking some restrictions somewhere.

    And, are they seriously stating that they got nothing and they just sat on their hands more than a month before sending it back in again for approval, calling them up personally, or sending applewood smoke signals? Something sounds horribly wrong on their part, regardless of Apple's side. As always, you only get the information they want you to get.
    553 posts | registered
  6. Yet another bad article from Ars with apparently no research done at all.

    Even a simple google search turns up two things immediately:

    1) It's a VoIP app, and Apple not only has to work with partners in regards approving VoIP, it is right now, and has been for the last six months or so, *changing* all the API's in regards VoIP.

    2) Freedom Voice is a huge concern that can drop 60,000 on app development and think it pocket change.

    This is a case of a developer using the media to prod Apple is all, and blogs like this one fall into the trap just as they have ever time before.

    Given the figures on acceptance that Apple announced t the iPhone 3.0 event, it seems pretty obvious that it is the developers that are driving this meme about Apple's wishy-washy acceptance behaviour and that if they kind of shut up about it (as they are supposed to by NDA anyway), they wouldn't have such a big problem. While the *perception* (driven by media sites such as this one) is that apps have trouble getting approved or are rejected out of hand for "silly" reasons, the *fact* is that almost all the apps you hear about in that regard are eventually approved.

    This tells me that the only thing driving the perception that apps aren't approved, is the tendency for developers to cry little rivers of tears to their friends in the tech blog community, who oblige them by publishing various stories about non-approval. If they merely waited until the end of the approval process (including appeals) to talk about their problems in public forums, there would not be this perception of a "problem" with the app store IMO.
    256 posts | registered
  7. Agreed. We have these guys transferring calls and this hungarian guy up here creating a replacement music app...both apps that even I, with a casual relationship at most to this whole enterprise, could have told you would at best experience delays and at worst be laughed out of 1 Infinite Loop. And yet they're both shocked that Apple didn't rubberstamp their app in 48 hours...
    1727 posts | registered
  8. "...and this hungarian guy up here creating a replacement music app..."

    The default iPod music player is unusable for DJs. It simply doesn't have the required functionality, controls or latency. Please check the feature list on the application's website what I'm talking about.
    6 posts | registered
  9. ...and the calendar app doesn't have the full set of functionality required by a professional executive assistant, and the video player lacks the tools a director really needs to edit a film. Every app could have extra features for some niche group or another. Nevertheless, Apple has made its position fairly clear that apps that duplicate and then "augment" core functionality of the iphone or ipod touch run a fairly high risk of non-acceptance. Argue the fairness of the policy if you want, but don't act all surprised when everything doesn't go smoothly for your app.
    1727 posts | registered
  10. That's all true, but Apple could be more forthcoming to developers.
    235 posts | registered
  11. There's always the Cydia Store, or (gasp) OTHER HANDSETS... Apple is obviously not interested in losing tight control over the functions included in the default apps, so those unhappy with the behavior of those particular apps have little recourse but to use a different handset or jailbreak their iPhone. I agree that this is crappy behavior for Apple, one which has a significant negative impact on the long-term viability of the platform, but them's the breaks at the moment. As a developer, you should at least be unsurprised by this behavior on the part of Apple. The iPhone is not the be-all, end-all mobile platform, no matter how close it might be to that possibility; it's just the least crappy option available at the moment. If you can't bear this reality, focus your efforts on improving the usability of open source alternatives such as Android, LiMo or even Symbian (though it's not UNIX, the horror).
    1083 posts | registered
  12. For all we know, the app is pending approval by the lawyers because they want to make sure it doesn't violate some agreement with ATT. Assuming the app is 100% complaint with Dev program rules, and at the same time, there's a possibility that it could violate a clause or two in the ATT agreement, legal could be researching ways to tighten things up a bit. The legal department at my company takes months to approve 3 lousy sentences on our site. 9 months of our revisions for the latest version of our EULA.

    Here's a description of the app - it just reeks of possible legal issues.

    FreedomVOICE Systems has released the beta version of its upcoming iPhone app, Newber. The application is the first location-aware business number, according to an official report issued yesterday by FreedomVOICE Systems. The Newber application is installed and launched on a person's iPhone to become a fully functional second line, which uses positioning technology to locate and seamlessly transfer calls to nearby landlines.
    453 posts | registered
  13. Wow, are these people stupid or what???
    You got a problem like that, you go to the top.
    Call Jobs, or Joswiac (sp?) or Forstall... you don't sit on your hands for 6 months.
    376 posts | registered
  14. quote:

    In other words, the problem isn't the problem. The problem is that people know about the problem. How deliciously Orwellian.
    208 posts | registered
  15. @Mr.Popcorn Please let me know their contact details.
    6 posts | registered
  16. This is one of the reasons why I don't believe in spec work. Apple has essentially created an environment where people create things for nothing, and then submit themselves to the mercy of their whims.

    What you end up with is a bunch of low quality shit, because nobody wants to throw Big Money at something that might eventually be rejected.
    3738 posts | registered

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