iPhone App Store Review Process

I have a few things to say about the hubub about Apple's iPhone App store review process. There are a lot of software developers out there getting their panties in a twist over having to submit their work for review and acceptance before an App can be sold in Apple's app store. There was a high profile hissy fit just yesterday that prompted me to finally write about this. Joe Hewitt the programmer behind Facebook's iPhone app quit yesterday. See the story HERE. He says he has finally had enough of Apple's submission process and refuses to work on an iPhone app any longer. This is especially ironic that he is calling Apple out for being a "walled garden" when he works for the largest walled garden on earth. I'm not the first to make this connection. Jon Gruber on Daring Fireball links to a tweet by @counternotions that calls out this irony.
I don't claim to know all the ins and outs of the app review process. I have read a lot about it so I think I know some about it. I am not a developer nor do I have any personal experience with Apple's app review process. That being said with what I do "think" I know I am just getting angrier and angrier at those who are whining and now quitting over this.
There is one comment I can make that I have not seen anyone else make yet. It's possible that someone has said this and I will update this post if I find it or if someone sends it my way. I have personal experience working for Microsoft on Xbox games. I spent 6 years there starting a year before the first Xbox shipped. I happen to know intimately the process for getting a game published on the Xbox. It is essentially the same for Nintendo and their game units including the Wii and the DS and for Sony and their game units including the Playstation and the PSP. You cannot just develop a game and ship it to stores or sell it online for any one of these devices. There is an excruciating review process that takes weeks and months of time before your game is approved for sale and publishing on any one of these platforms. I have yet to see anything remarkably different between the app review process Apple has created and those of Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony. This is why I am so angry at these people that are so indignant and up in arms that they can't have complete freedom to create something and just throw it on the iPhone. There is precedence for this review process and it has been around since the very early days of video games. The console creators had to do this to protect their brand and their Intellectual property. They did it to try and make sure that the experience of using a Playstation or Xbox is an excellent one and does no harm to the hardware and their image etc. Oh, I just remembered one significant difference between the iPhone app review process and this video game example I have just given. When you as a developer submit a game for review to any one of these game console makers you pay THEM for the privilege of having your game reviewed. Yes, you read that right, the developer of the software pays money, several thousand dollars, to have their software approved for publishing. Apple does not charge for this service. There is a small fee to become a developer yes, but that is different in that you may never submit anything for review or you may submit a thousand apps for review. It is not a charge for the reviewing service. How much do you think it has cost Apple to do all the work to develop this app store and review what is now well over 100,000 application in the store? It has to be millions and millions of dollars.
Now, after saying all of this I can see that there have been issues even big issues with Apple's review process. They are fixing them. They are making changes to improve the process almost weekly. Going from zero to 100,000 applications in the short amount of time they have had is remarkable I think. No, it is not perfect and I can understand why some have been frustrated. I have no qualms with a lot of the frustrations people have had, they have had perfectly good gripes and a lot of them have been fixed. I have a problem with those that want the review process to essentially go away. They want complete freedom to be "creative" etc. Bullcrap. Apple is absolutely doing the right thing to protect the iPhone experience and to protect their contracts with the Cell service providers. AT&T has had enough trouble keeping up with the explosion of network usage the iPhone has created can you even imagine what would have happened if the App Store was a completely open garden? AT&T's network would have been destroyed along with their business. Apple should trust you? Hell no. Allegedly, even this Joe Hewitt guy has used some private frameworks in some of his code. Private frameworks that are forbidden to be used by developers in order to protect the device, the network and Apple's and AT&T's brand.
I hope Joe Hewitt and the others like him have fun developing apps for the other mobile platforms like Android, Blackberry and Palm's WebOS. They all aren't completely open either. They are going to run into some of the same issues they are complaining about with Apple. They will miss out on working on a platform that has revolutionized mobile computing. You cannot argue that Apple has done this. The numbers speak for themselves. The last thing I have to say to these whiners is, when you are working on building something great it will NEVER be easy. It is the easy road that had gotten us to where we were pre-iPhone. Your choices were WindowsMobile, Nokias Linux based Symbian and Blackberry. They were going nowhere really really slow, and even now with a clear leader showing them how it's done the rest are scrambling to change and emulate. Some are only now coming close to what Apple did 3 years ago. Personally, I cannot wait to see what year four of the iPhone revolution brings.