App Store Retrospective
But what’s even more scary, to me, than a mistake Apple might have made recently (such as its deprecation of UDIDs) is how relevant this old list of complaints remains. Remember, when I wrote this, the App Store was just one year old. I figured, they might just not have had time to get to these items, and that they’d improve as time went by. But, since then, they’ve had time to replay the entire life of the App Store thrice more, and for the most part, nothing has changed.
It seems like the review process has gotten faster. But most of the policy changes seem to be in the direction of adding more restrictions rather than addressing developers’ concerns. To me, the interesting question is to what extent Apple actively likes the App Store the way it is, that it’s working as designed. And to what extent the problems stem from the music store origins, and Apple simply hasn’t thought about it that much since the overall sales numbers and press have been good.
