Part of it may be a byproduct of the way the console games distributed on ROMs or disks. That may change, for consoles nowadays have network connection and can get updates anytime. There's another part, however, that some type of games fits this "done is done" philosophy. Like novels or movies, which you don't expect them to be improved over time.

Well, I don't defend the app store process either, and I believe majority of software should be developed in the iterative process. It's just interesting that games may be a marginal area that has some peculiar properties.

Apple wants iPhone apps to "just work" They don't want a plethora of buggy, half-baked, inconsistent apps in their store, because this would diminish the brand. It would be like a typical Linux distribution where half the apps implement their own peculiar UI conventions, crash often, or just don't work at all.

So it is like developing a game. You get one release, one chance, to get it right. It needs to work. Maybe a lot of app developers don't get this. There are published standards about conventions, icons, behavior, etc. The app is expected to be FINISHED and WORKING before you submit it to the store. Don't count on deploying 27 follow up patches and updates to customers -- imagine the chaos if every iPhone app needed updates multiple times. Users (most of whom are not hackers) would, after a while, just give up and abandon the platform.

So, when an app is submitted, it is reviewed, and if it's found to be buggy, or it doesn't work, or it works in an unconventional way, then they don't want it. And they're not in a particular hurry to waste more time on you when you didn't follow the instructions the first time.

I don't know, I'm just speculating. But this seems plausible to me.

however, speaking as a guy who has went through the process for 8+ apps so far, that's not the pain point.

It's more about repeatedly encountering dumbass reasons for rejections, and dumbass long delays to get feedback on things that should take about 1 minute, not 2-4 weeks to get feedback on. It's about getting rejected for 1 thing, and then they don't bother to finish reviewing the app and discover the other 2 things that they know they would reject it on during the next submission, so you don't find those out until 2-4 weeks later, and so on, ad nauseum. It's about rejecting for inane reasons (that they can "fix", if they wanted to, and had a brain, by running a small piece of software on, shotgun-style) like 'this config value over here doesn't match this value over there, so please make those the same', or even worse, vague mysteriously-worded rejections, or rejections that contain explicit instructions for "fixing" the issue and then you follow them, resubmit and they reject again.

Dumbasses. I keep coming back to that word over and over again when dealing with their review process/people. We're talking about a company with supposedly billions of dollars in cash in the bank and until a few months ago or so reportedly had what 50 full-time reviewers on staff? (Do the math on what it would cost to even triple that staff and you'll see it's a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the profits that keep rolling in.)

Device? Love it.

OS? Love it.

Design sense? Love it.

App Store submission/review process? Dumbasses.

I think this is a good "oh yeah, this is why we do it" argument, but is probably more of a by-product of the review process and less of Apple's original incentive.

A lot of the technical decisions that are made are motivated by business and profit. Not to say that this is a negative thing - Apple is a corporation after all. There are plenty of things I've seen done that are dumb as hell at my employer (at a technical level) but are motivated by external reasons that seem implausible or illogical because the guy writing code is too far removed from the information and the decision.

The OS bundled ones are the ones people use the most. Across the board.

If I had to guess, I'd say third party apps are just as often or more used on iPhone than on, say, Windows and Mac OS X. Simply because, on iPhone, a lot of web apps out there are used via a special-purpose iPhone app rather than the web interface.

I don't think there are any killer mobile apps yet. Maybe for some it's FourSquare or FB, but I can't think of one app I'd miss that's not built in.

When I hear someone say "I wish I had an iPhone right now", it's usually because they're either (i) lost, or looking for something, and want access to Google Maps, or (ii) in the throes of gadget envy. The App Store addresses (ii), but not with any single app -- it's just the idea that there are thousands of fun toys that only iPhone users get to play with.

So there are a couple of killer features, but nothing that can't be replicated on other phones. Not necessarily as well, but that's not the point: without exclusivity, the iPhone will not get the same kind of dominance Windows has.

If you polled a random user of, what are the chances you would find an app that they will get very pissed off at it's disappearance?

What are the chances they will actually skip platforms?

On Windows or OSX, I think the answer is high. On iphone, maybe not.

It is still a luxury for most people - "oh cool look at this app," but it still comes down to those that can afford an iPhone. I can imagine there are many family squabbles involving parents that bought their kid an iPhone that racked up an App Store bill the parents didn't originally intend.

iPhone is not a business phone overall - and therefore doesn't have "critical apps".

I really doubt this is true given the lack of any killer mobile apps. I don't personally consider any of desktop apps in the list I gave 'killer', but fairly sure they've sold lots of computers.

The year that iPhone existed without the App Store, no smartphone competitors came close to replicating it's core functionality and user experience. I don't think that's quite true anymore, and so I think that the App Store is one of the iPhone's key advantages. Specifically, the iPhone didn't need the App Store to differentiate itself from RIM and WinMo in 2007, but I think it absolutely needs the App Store to differentiate itself from the Pre and Android in 2009.

I don't think there is one killer 3rd-party app on the phone that everyone needs to have, but there could very well be many third party apps that smaller niches need to have. For me personally, MLB At-Bat (live streaming of baseball games) and the Kindle reader are actually the two biggest factors keeping me from switching to Droid. Those applications could easily be ported to Android, but haven't been yet, and in both cases a third party holds the distribution rights for the content so it's not like me or another hacker could replicate those apps easily.

All the ads I've seen lately for the iPhone are of the "there's an app for that" variety. So Apple themselves seem to think that the apps are a critical factor.

That being said, the iPhone sold very well before there were any apps at all.

I agree with others - the app store is not that important. It's a fun thing. I'm not convinced it'll even be around/relevant in 5 years.

Any app that makes someone get an iPhone instead of something else is a "killer app" as far as Apple is concerned, even if it only sold a total of 27 copies and lost the developer a lot of money. So even if the iPhone doesn't have any one killer app, the sheer diversity of apps means there is probably a killer app out there for most people, and that is vital for Apple.

I wouldn't believe that for a minute. The App Store would have been part of the iPhone product plan from day 1. It's too big, too complex, too strategic, and (yes) too well-executed to be a panicked response to developers' demands.

That's how Apple under Jobs has always done things: major features are not "supported" or "planned" or "offered" or "part of the company's philosophy"... at least, not until they appear out of nowhere one day.

“I don’t want people to think of this as a computer,” he said. “I think of it as reinventing the phone.”

"We define everything that is on the phone,” he said. “You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers.”

The iPhone, he insisted, would not look like the rest of the wireless industry.

“These are devices that need to work, and you can’t do that if you load any software on them,” he said. “That doesn’t mean there’s not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn’t mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment.”

But the App Store was announced to the public only seven months after that, in June of 2008.

If they did all that work in seven months, my resume will be on someone's desk at Apple by Monday. Seriously. I don't want to compete with any large companies that can move that fast. They win.

No, the only reasonable conclusion is that you can't take Jobs at his word when he appears to rule something out.

Edit: And the question isn't really were they going to have an app store or not - they very well could have been thinking along those lines but reserving it only for software they themselves were going to create or with select partners - the question is whether they were going to open it up to general developers which I think they did not want to do.

Developer relations are central to Apple as a whole. Apples needs iPhone developers, desktop developers, web developers and developers for whatever they do after the iPhone. If Apple creates hostile feelings in the developer community with its App Store behavior, Apple is going to have ongoing problems regardless of whether it needs third party developers at the moment.