“For every dev that leaves iPhone in frustration, 1000 new ones join up. iPhone is an unstoppable train regardless of how much we complain.” – Joe Hewitt in a tweet yesterday.
How right he is.
Facebook’s VP of Communications Elliot Schrage has just left us a comment on our post from yesterday explaining that while Hewitt may be moving on, Facebook “has a great team of engineers taking over iPhone related development.” May an entire team blossom, apparently.
Schrage left the comment because there has been much brouhaha over developer Joe Hewitt’s decision to stop working on the Facebook iPhone app because he’s fed up with Apple’s App Store policies. Schrage obviously wants to make it clear that Hewitt’s stance does not in any way signify how Facebook as a company feels towards Apple. We don’t really think our story yesterday implied that, but okay, noted.
Here’s the full comment that Schrage left on the post from yesterday:
This is Elliot Schrage, VP of Communications at Facebook. There’s been a fair amount of confusion and speculation about Joe’s comments and whether they reflect the official position of Facebook. They don’t. Facebook’s relationship with Apple and our commitment to the iPhone platform remain strong. IIn fact, though Joe himself will be moving to new projects, Facebook has a great team of engineers taking over iPhone related development. More generally, our work bringing Facebook Connect to the iPhone and with iTunes, iPhoto and other great products over the past year should illustrate our commitment to expanding our relationship with Apple and finding new ways to offer new services and features to the people who use both our products.
A beautifully crafted (minus the typo, of course) piece of PR work there. Are you reading this, Apple? Facebook is asking nicely not to be put in the penalty box.
Seriously though, while Facebook may not be on the same page as Hewitt with regard to the App Store policies, we are. As much as I think Apple generally makes great products, the App Store continues to be rife with hypocrisy and heartache. And it’s only going to get worse as it continues to grow. It’s good to see a developer of Hewitt’s caliber take the stance.
[photo: flickr/appsara]
Why would you run a screen shot of the “1000 new ones sign up” quote when it is obviously made up? Do you publish other things that people make up as well?
i’m missing your point here.
I think Jeffery was implying that the 1000 developers new quote is not technically accurate. As in not an actual statistic. Is that your point, @jeffreymcmanus?
he’d be right, but also wrong. that’s because it’s an expression.
Fact check: Apple is not a train or otherwise rail-enabled transportation organization.
@jeffreymcmanus, not sure what you’re talking about
http://twitter....atus/5645649654
why would you levy such a charge, say it’s ‘obvious’ and then leave it at that? did you click on the tweet itself, or note that the account has 13,000+ followers who disagree with you?
please refrain from filling the comments with belligerent noise.
Idiot. One of the most ridiculous comments I’ve ever read.
Microsoft’s vast army of basement-dwelling gamer / creeps is going to hate Apple nomatter what it does.
@Zato, What are you talking about?
I don’t even know if his comment was anti-Apple, much les pro-MS. In fact I don’t even think he was talking about Apple or MS…turn your fanboy sensitivities down please.
@twatson will rock the iPhone development.
I would kill to be the apprentice of Sir Hewitt.
“Facebook VP Leaves A Lover Letter For Apple”
A beautifully crafted title…minus the typo of course.
totally on purpose
If iPhone is an unstoppable train let’s hope Android is the immovable object.
ha. good line.
Remember its a robot, it does what you want it do.
and then they destroy themselves in the process?
sweeeet
That’s… actually a pretty good line.
Time for a Facebook VP Android Love Letter
more like an apology letter for that weak ass app they currently have… the only thing it can do is display the stream…seriously facebook? That’s the best you could do after taking so long. The 3rd party apps do more than that and they don’t even have direct access to Facebook API like you give to your own apps….
Facebook didn’t even make the Android App. Google engineers are the ones behind the facebook App on Android, because facebook didn’t want to use its resources.
Totally agree with you. How can you not allow for simple things: delete emails for example and it took them so long to cook up the latest version
Since when has anyone actually cared what a VP of BS -er, Communications – said?
Lol. Loving your comment. Gave me a chuckle!!
I want to give full credence to the source of the original tweet (@counternotions) that inspires my comment, but doesn’t the Facebook developer’s response reek just a tiny bit of people in glass houses shouldn’t be throwing stones?
Hewitt works for Facebook, after all, the largest walled garden on earth (in the words of @counternotions).
A little but chutzpah goes a long way.
Mark
Yeah, but who really cares about developing for Facebook? The whole reason Facebook was able to beat MySpace was that it was very clean with little 3rd party bloat. The iPhone, on the other hand, only came into its own after opening up the App Store. Comparing smartphones and social network sites is like comparing apples and social network sites.
Um, actually a lot of people care about developing for Facebook. 300M users seems like a compelling reason to care to me.
Totally valid point.
Brilliant image.
Wonder who is the creative genius behind the TC story images?
a powerful warrior.
iPhone = unstoppable train
Android = unstoppable train wreck
hehe
Thanks for the input, fanboy!
lol.
Remind anyone else of high school?
Please read very good comment on this from Jeff L:http://iphonedevelopment.blogspot.com/2009/11/joe-hewitt-quits-iphone-dev.html
main point: facebook policy is far worse than Apple’s
If Joe’s right, what is the business case for Apple to put down the control stick?
As a guy who had to decide which horse to ride with mobile apps, we chose iPhone because 75% of all mobile traffic was coming from them.
I will trade traffic and access to Apple’s audience for freedom and philosophical harmony every time.
All successful platform companies core value is a ready audience. The *really* successful ones (from both a financial and usage standpoint) exert paranoid levels of control over their developers eventually.
MSFT, Intel, Google, facebook etc are all loved and hated by their development communities.
Oh, and just ask people about how Android has favored some comapnies over others in the race to put out a kickass device.
Don’t knock keeping control as a business upside, especially if the consumers don’t really see the problems. We all serve them at the end of the day.
.
+ 1
“iPhone is an unstoppable train
regardless of how much we complain.”
Hewitt, I feel your pain.
But think not your gripes to be in vain.
Won’t be long till we toast champagne,
Thanks to App Store policies nothing short of inane.
Think me insane? In the membrane? Or the mainframe?
‘Fore ye despair and cut your vein,
Give yourself this idea, to entertain,
That ye may yet the truth ascertain:
Should Apple persist with both ball and chain,
Not even the cleverest ad campaign
Will preserve their seat on the gravy train;
Their dev talent pool will eventually drain,
If not for App Store policies so inhumane,
Then for diminishing potential financial gain.
And that’s a guarantee I’ll gladly maintain.
Remember how hard it is for us to hide our disdain,
We Software Devs, we of the left brain.
Won’t be long till we stop acting urbane;
From the iPhone API we’ll depart, and Jobs will explaim:
“Can it get any worse?” Right before it starts to rain.
Android is Die Hard 4; Apple is Snakes on a Plane.
Trust me, we’ll go out like John McClane:
Yippee ki-yay, motherfucker.
That’s quite a work… and its buried (in a clutter of comments) just like some brilliant apps are buried in clutter of 100,000 apps…
I was high as shit when I wrote that, and now I’m afraid to read it, for fear that it’s as terrible as I think it might be.
Holy fuck, I just posted a comment about smoking weed at 4:20 PST without even realizing it.
If only I lived in that time zone.
clap, clap, clap.
that’s some strong mead, lou
can I rap this?
Apple should acquire Facebook when the latter’s valuation drops to an amount appropriate for a company with no viable business model. I think the cultures would integrate well with each other. Neither company has any respect for their respective developer communities. They both see third party apps as a necessary evil that only exist to further the reach of their platforms.
yay 2 walled gardens…if only they would do that so steve jobs’ ego can get bigger.
Apple’s recent embrace of 3rd-party apps aside, Facebook and Apple couldn’t be further apart in how they view & deal with developers.
Whether or not Facebook has a perfect understanding of how it wants to interact with developers, their culture certainly seems to appreciate the 3rd-party market.
can’t say that Apple has come anywhere close to that level of care & concern, even though the last year or so has been a dramatic change of historical disdain for devs.
Granted, Facebook cares about developers of apps if farm animals are involved but for those developers that want to do anything interesting with the platform data Facebook’s TOS finds away to block them from effectively serving the needs of their users. The privacy excuse is getting very thin. Users should be able to decide what’s best for them, not Facebook. If Facebook’s policies were actually developer-friendly then the proof would be the availability of a wide variety of useful applications.
I know how frustrating the entire process is. I made a satirical application poking fun at all of the silly little applications about girls and it was rejected. They eventually phoned me to tell me it was “over the top.”
Seemed fair enough to me, even though I didn’t think it was at all offensive and it showed no nudity. Then I read this and find MULTIPLE applications that not only utilize the exact function that I was told made it “over the top” and unacceptable, but do it in a much more offensive and sexual manner.
hahaha. you got shutdown by crapple. that sucks man. who’d you talk to, and did they specifically point out what was so over the top about it? what was the rating of the app?
I talked to a guy named Steve (not Jobs). He was definitely nice enough but it’s frustrating regardless.
You could give a wedgie to the person (just an image of the back of a person) and watch it smack back. It was a joke application for fun and it was rated 17+. There was no nudity or anything sexual, it was all intended to be a joke but he compared it to a blow up doll and said you can’t manipulate articles of clothing. Then I found Puff and it does worse than my application.
the fb app on iphone is not very good so it’s best he left anyway
Was trolling the Oz app store yesterday for Asia-related travel apps –searched for “Asia” and 7 of the 15 apps that the search returned were boob or schoolgirl related… Sadly that says much about what people think of in relation to Asia, but more importantly it raises some issues IMO regarding QC within the app store.
come to my site photoshop dudes.tk and get a free domain when you leave your e mail in blog
That Mark Zuckerberg is a Steve Jobs wannabe.
http://valleywa...pers-conference
Droid!
“Are you reading this, Apple? Facebook is asking nicely not to be put in the penalty box.”
It’s not often I see a story on TechCrunch that simply misses the point, but here, it seems, is the exception.
I doubt that letter was directed at Apple. Far more likely, it was directed at the users—the people with the Facebook app installed on their iPhones, who may be wondering whether this developer’s departure means they’re going to be left out in the cold.
Play the “App Store is a walled garden” angle for all it’s worth, fine, but when it ceases to be relevant, leave it aside.
I really don’t see the problem. Hewitt decided not to deal anymore with Apple policies and he quit developing for iPhone. Not a big deal. There are tons of other developers who don’t have any problem in developing awesome applications within the limits traced by Apple. And they know that the approval process is about a 14 days period. I never saw any xbox developer complaining because they had to wait a month before all the discs were manufactured and shipped from china to their warehouses and then distributed to the stores…
Do you guys know the full reason Joe Hewitt quit Apple development?
In case not here is what i found out today the hard way(rejection of app):
Joe released everything he thought could save other developers lots of work as a libary. That step can not be praised high enough. He released awesome tools with his Three20-libary!
Problem is that in his code he used some stuff(that he most likely found while debugging).
Suddenly now Apple rejects new applications and updates to existing ones that use the Three20 libary, while apps live in the appstore use this stuff. So hundreds of developers got recently rejected because of usage of Three20.
I’m offended that you did not post a picture of Forrest Gump holding an apple.
This all feels a bit too much to do with semantics. Every little tweet from individuals from companies being over analyzed and raked over the coals for some pseudo-political correctness and/or adherence to existing policies. I thought the point was being more open and being more transparent. Not sure how we get there if someone Tweets about, “Man this Apple sucks!” Which is followed up later by a company press release stating, “Our former Apple development head John Gump Doe has since moved on to other projects. By apple he was simply referring to the apple he bought from the grocery store and not Apple Apple. Sorry for any confusion, hurt or anger their tweet may have caused. It is our official company policy when Tweeting about Apple to clarify whether or not someone is referring to the fruit or the company. Peace out!”
Hey dickheads… This was written by MG Siegler. So its going to be about how cool apple is…
http://www.theb...cgi?u=macs_cant
Check out this application called Speedflirt, http://www.speedflirt.com its the coolest dating service ive seen!
Should make the process simple