10 days ago, Facebook developer Joe Hewitt rocked the iPhone development world when he announced that he would stop making iPhone apps because he was fed up with the way Apple is running the App Store. This is significant since Hewitt was pretty much solely responsible for one of the most popular (and best) iPhone apps out there: Facebook’s. And now, just a little over a week later, we may be seeing the downside of Hewitt’s decision.

The Facebook iPhone app is broken, and has been for a while now. Every single user profile page contains zero updates or posts. Instead, each loads a stream that reads “USER has no recent posts.” Judging from Twitter searches, tips coming in, and a Facebook thread, this has been the case since at least yesterday, and possibly before that.

Do a search for Google Wave on the App Store from your iPhone or desktop client, and you’ll see an application called just that pop up, ready to be installed as soon as you fork over $0.99 (or €0.79 in my case). One caveat: it’s not built, authorized or in any way endorsed by Google.

Spotted by Stuart Dredge over at Mobile Entertainment, the unofficial Google Wave iPhone app seemingly slipped past Apple’s usually and notoriously rigorous quality assurance and trademark compliance team and made its way to the App Store (iTunes link – up to you to decide if this is something you want to pay for).

If you’re addicted to Techmeme, like we are, you’re probably addicted to reading it on your mobile phone too. The problem is that the experience hasn’t been great. There was a mobile version of the site, called Mini-Techmeme, but no one seemed to know about it. More importantly, it didn’t give the full Techmeme experience because it didn’t include discussion items. Today, Techmeme has launched a new version of its site optimized for smart phones.

If you visit the regular Techmeme site now on devices like an iPhone, a Palm Pre, or the new Verizon Droid, you’ll see a site optimized for touchscreen phones. The site include three main tabs, “Top, ” More,” and “New.” These represent the three key areas of Techmeme’s main site. This tabbed navigation allows you to easily jump through the sections. Each section contains the main headlines and a right pointing arrow which you click on to see the discussion items.

Google is powerful. We all know this, and live with it. But that brings up some interesting concerns when they break into new businesses — will they use that power to give them an unfair advantage? With great power comes great responsibility, and all that. Today brings a totally innocuous example, but it’s still interesting.

A new feature in Gmail Labs allows you to change your contacts’ circular chat status icons in Android logo status icons. But the key is that these icons only change for users who are currently online on their Android phones.

ShopSavvy was one of the best early Android applications. It launched in October of last year after winning one of the initial Android Developer Challenge top prizes (when it was still known as GoCart). But despite the success it has seen on Android, one question remained: When would it be available for the iPhone. Today, it finally is.

Developed by the guys at Big In Japan, ShopSavvy is an app that allows you to use your device as a portable barcode scanner. You point your phone’s camera at any barcode and it will read it, do a product look up, and give you information about the product, as well as where you can find it online or at nearby stores and for how much. Obviously, something like this is a window shopper’s dream.

One of the reasons I broke down and bought a Kindle earlier this year was a favorite service of mine, Instapaper, the simple bookmarking tool, rolled out Kindle support. Despite my belief that the Kindle is a) way too expensive and b) a fleeting technology that will be replaced by all-in-one devices, my job requires that I read a lot of online content, and Instapaper + Kindle support allows me to do so without having to spend all my time at the computer. That said, Instapaper’s Kindle support has always been less than ideal. Today, developer Marco Arment (also the lead developer for the micro-blogging site Tumblr) has done something about that.

The Gillmor Gang debated the virtues and otherwise of the smartphone’s latest pretender to the iPhone crown: Droid. Michael Arrington led the Droid’s faction, with a QVC-like enthusiasm for the power of Any Phone That Runs Google Voice. Of course, he keeps his iPhone and iTouch a handy arm-grab away, but with Droid he may finally have some rationale for excommunicating himself from the Apple bosom.

The New York Times’ Saul Hansell provided context at the telecom level, while ex-monopoly telecom BT’s JP Rangaswami placed his and BT’s bet on the future of open platforms such as Android. JP’s partner in crime at BT and subsidiary Ribbit, Kevin Marks, supported Arrington’s vision of a game-changer in voice, while Robert Scoble was happy to defend the iPhone with faint praise just so he could have something to argue about with Arrington. He also elicits some new CrunchPad details from Mike.

“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.

Market share is probably the easiest and most often used point of comparison between competing products. It makes sense: If something has a large share of the market, it’s probably doing well. But that doesn’t always mean that it’s doing better than something with less market share, especially from a business perspective.

I bring this up because today brought some very interesting numbers from the research firm, Strategy Analytics. According to them, Apple has surpassed Nokia as the most profitable phone maker in the world. I’ll throw some numbers at you in a second to show why this is really incredible, but the key takeaway is that this is why, at the end of the day, Apple wins.

Back in June, we wrote about Birdfeed, an iPhone Twitter application that finally brought the speed and simplicity to rival what many consider to be the top client, Tweetie. It’s a great app that offers a different look and feel from Tweetie (and especially now Tweetie 2), which some users prefer. And it’s about to gain a key feature which could further differentiate it: Geolocation.

Now, to be clear, as we previewed last month, the upcoming version of Tweetie, 2.1, will also support Twitter’s new geolocation feature. But the new version of Birdfeed, 1.2, does it in a way that highlights it much more. And in fact, when Twitter geolocation support finally does roll out (it’s due very soon, we hear), Birdfeed has a good shot to be the go-to app for it at launch.

In major metropolitan areas, the BlackBerry at lunchtime is a force to be reckoned with. And now it can be a device to help those urbanities actually find a place to eat with the launch of Urbanspoon for BlackBerry.

Urbanspoon has been one of the most popular apps for the iPhone since it launched alongside the App Store in the summer of 2008. By blending location data with a fun, accelerometer-based way of finding good nearby restaurants, it even caught Apple’s eye, which soon began featuring it in its television commercials, fueling its success. And that success led to IAC eventually purchasing the self-funded startup in April of this year for a price in the seven-figure range.

Now that in-app purchasing for free apps has been live for a few weeks in the iTunes App Store, and Apple is now ranking the top-grossing apps, whether they start out as free or paid, we have some initial data on what kinds of apps are pulling in the most money from in-app purchases. (In-app purchases allow apps to offer a free version and then make money by requiring consumers to pay for additional features or content). Today, Distimo put out a report (download it here) which breaks down the top 40 grossing in-app purchasing titles by category. Games, social betworking, and Book apps are doing the best job upselling consumers from free apps to paid enhancements. Music, news, and finance apps, not so much.

As we were all painfully aware, it took AT&T forever to bring MMS to the iPhone. A new app has just been released that hopes to one-up it.

Knocking, made by Pointy Heads Software, is basically a photo-sharing app on steroids. With it, you can pretty much instantaneously share up to 100 photos at once between two iPhones. This works by establishing a connection between the two phones, during which one user selects another user with the app and “knocks” the pictures over to them. The video below shows just how simple and fast this process is.

Last month, Apple rejected the Someecards iPhone app because it contained satirical comedy about public figures. After attempting to make their case and getting stonewalled, Someecards eventually gave into Apple and removed the offending cards which made fun of Hitler and Roman Polanski, among others. Apple swiftly approved the app and all was well.

Well, not exactly.

Apparently, Apple contacted Someecards a couple days ago because of some new content in the app — Someecards pushes new cards into the app just as it does on its site. There was one in particular that Apple did not find amusing, and wanted clarification on: A card making fun of President Obama Halloween costumes. It’s fairly easy to see why Apple wanted some clarification, the card involves race. Here’s what it says: “Just double-checking that your Obama costume will involve a mask and not shoe polish.”

Up until now, if you wanted to use the location-based service Gowalla on the go, you had to have an iPhone. Today, that expands to Android. But rather than building an app, Gowalla has extended support to Android using the mobile web. This works because Android’s browser is closely tied to the device and is able to access location information, which is vital for Gowalla. The goal is to extend this mobile web support to BlackBerry and a few other location-aware devices in the next week or so, co-founder Josh Williams tells us.

As a small team, Gowalla, like its rival Foursquare, doesn’t have a lot of resources to devote to building apps on all the mobile platforms, so this is a good solution for the time being. Eventually, the plan is to have native apps for all the big platforms, Williams says.

This just keeps getting more and more ridiculous. Before I begin, let me start out by saying that all things being equal, I have no problem with the Apple putting Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf into the App Store, as they have today, as both The Next Web and Edible Apple spotted. It’s a book, it’s a rather big part of history, it’s in book stores, etc. That said, all things are not equal in the App Store, not even close. And by Apple’s own standards there is no way this should have been approved.

Let me remind everyone that Apple rejected a Someecards application last month partially due to the fact that one of the cards included was mocking Hitler (and more specifically, the film Inglourious Basterds). They flat out rejected it, didn’t require a certain rating for the satire, just rejected it. So when you see Mein Kampf in the store, complete with a swastika as its icon, you’ll forgive me if I’m a bit dumbfounded.

Last month, I lashed out against cable companies and their cable boxes because they are junk. Absolute trash. The hardware is slow, the UIs are terrible, and the remotes are like Fisher Price toys. This is 2009, not 1989.

Today in San Francisco, AT&T held a Tech Showcase to show off some of the new innovations they are working on in their labs. One such thing I got a demo of was a way to use your iPhone to search television content simply by using your voice. While you may think something like this is less than ideal, it’s fast and very accurate. Watch below as the demonstration goes from simple to more complex. And, of course, a regular touch-based remote is included as well to select things.

I hold in my hand the new Apple Remote. In case you missed it, Apple quietly launched it alongside the new iMacs, Mac minis, Magic Mice, and MacBooks a couple weeks ago. Simply put: I don’t get it.

That’s not to say it’s not a nice looking product — it is, but there have been some changes that make me confused as to what Apple exactly is trying to do with this thing. From a design perspective, it makes sense. The new remote now has the brushed aluminum and black button exterior that graces both Apple’s MacBook Pro line and the iMac line these days. The original Apple Remote was all white plastic (aside from the top sensor), that matched the older iMacs that it originally launched with.

When the iPhone OS 3.1 update rolled through town, it brought with it a handful of new features – but it also killed off one, not-so-official feature: unauthorized data tethering on AT&T.

Early this morning, the endlessly ingenious iPhone hacking community released Blacksn0w, a carrier unlock for the iPhone 3G and 3GS. Even if you have no need to plug in a different SIM card than what was originally intended, however, Blacksn0w still has its perks. Namely, it brings the aforementioned unauthorized data tethering right on back.

We’ve just walked through the process, and it went off without a hitch. If you’re interested in doing the same but don’t want to do it alone, we’ve thrown together a handy step-by-step guide, just for you.

When Loopt launched in 2006 it was ahead of a curve that is just starting to be recognized: Location. Now, with services like Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite, and even Twitter fueling the location-based services frenzy, Loopt realized that it needed to shift its strategy a bit. Enter Pulse, a new feature launching today.

Previously, Loopt was more of a passive service — you started it up on some device and it kept track of where you were. Other users could see where you were if they opened the app too, but generally it wasn’t about pinging your friends to let them know where you are and what you were doing. But Pulse makes Loopt much more of an active service. It recommends hot places, hot events, and lets you know what your friends are up to.