Hi, Cupertino.
This is, more or less, kind of a disjointed letter about the App Store.
You see, the stuff you’ve done… it’s amazing. Really. No other word for it. And, yet, also amazingly low in its lows.
These lows are very, very irritating for me as an App Store developer.
I’m not a man of words. I prefer to be a coder — a maker — a builder of things. So, when I got the impluse of writing this letter, I knew I wouldn’t be able to cover everything that’s wrong with App Store with any decent degree of precision.
I just picked a few big things that annoy me, at random. Here they are.
Problem number one is pace. Software is hard to get right and harder to fix. I agree with other articles you’ve probably already read: software is made fast, built fast, fixed fast these days.
And you — you’re effectively acting as a roadblock. You have become the enemy of the better, of the now.
In your quest to make software better, you make it worse. Outdated. Buggy.
Problem number two is opacity. We don’t know what’s going on in your heads. What’s worse, you’ve by design chosen not to show what’s going on in your heads. We can't know. Most of the time it feels like you’ve designed us out of the process. And some of the time, we cannot even fathom what you're thinking — something is good one moment, bad the next.
We can’t get a straight answer anytime soon. In most cases we literally cannot get an answer: “Do you allow it?” beckons a “Try and see”. “How long yet?” gives a “We ourselves don’t know”. Hard to make a business plan out of that, now, isn’t it?
Your policies are unknowable, your world inaccessible, your users — we are users, too, Apple, paying customers of your Program and your tools and your computers and your phones — utterly frustrated.
Problem number three is support. The system is barely pleasant to use when everything’s going all right, but it’s a nightmare to be in every time there’s an exception: and, as implied above, some exceptions a developer simply cannot predict.
“Going to the press to get borderline-yet-harmless cases pushed in” has embarassingly become standard practice. How could you let it become so?
Let’s talk about my one concrete case; just one of the possible examples.
I had sent a major application update to App Store — an update to an application that you liked so much, you even chose to open one of your ads with it. It was tested and worked right; it was reviewed and worked right; people downloaded it from App Store and it crashed in a peculiar way. Users were angry; I was dumbfounded.
It appears, for all intents and purposes, that the application somehow broke during whatever opaque thing you do when you prepare it for iTunes Store (which we cannot, of course, know). Ouch. Oh, well. I fire off e-mails to all applicable Apple support outlets — Tech Incident, iTunes Connect, more — while responding to the mass of angry users flooding my inbox. “It won’t take long”, I think. “Users will start complaining, and they'll have to take notice and it's probably just a matter of telling the server to redo what it did and whatnot. It can’t take long.”
I wait.
I wait.
Eurodev, Eurodev phone support, Store user support all say I have to ask iTunes Connect (which I already did in the initial mass e-mailing). Oh, well; not their field, is it?
But iTunes Connect says I should have opened a tech incident. I start not liking the sudden responsibility volleyball one bit. Anyway, I had also applied for a tech incident anyway on day one, so, well, no problem here, right?
Tech Incident asks for app sources, I give them an explanation of the problem and the source and what I sent to Connect. They say, “uh, yea, looks like what you sent initially should've worked”.
I’m angry, because things are going at a snail’s pace.
Then, after six days of this, I get a response for one of the original e-mails. It was sent to a contact I had within Apple. He ensures me that, since now internal Apple stuff is suddenly endangered by my app not working
(I cannot say what, exactly, in public: that’s most likely Apple Confidential Information™ that I’m bound not to reveal — anyone who wants to contact me with an @apple.com e-mail address, I'll give details)
he’ll put some pressure on the system to fix this.
Suddenly everything springs back to life. And yet, even so, I have to play a game of “guess what’s going wrong?” with your backend, unaided by either Tech Support or App Review, volleying new builds that change just barely one from the other, in the hope of having one of them work. Fortunately, I guess right after three or four trials — each an emergency review, for each having to wait the better part of a day since reviewers are awake when I sleep.
I have yet to hear from the Tech Incident. I only hope they found what this damned thing was.
I can only hope it won’t happen again.
The real problem with this is that it’s killing the fun. It’s why I do this; I make stuff because I love making stuff. It’s a big part of what this activity is about, in the end, for all of us makers.
To be fair: I’m still having fun. Writing the app, making the app. Trying to understand what is wrong and trying to fix it. Making things more beautiful as much as I can in the little time I have; making a pretty penny out of it is also a welcome bonus.
I understand stuff like, say, working a creative job like this in an industrial context. I understand deadlines, I understand budgets, I understand relationships with other companies and people and how they will affect what I do and what I need to do.
I don’t understand having to work with a partner whose every whim I have to cater to. I don’t understand a partner changing the rules from under my nose, not guaranteeing anything,
dragging its feet when it's time to fix its own snags.
I love the making but I dread the delivery, now.
App Store is the best, but only in relative terms. Everyone else has a worse deal than you have, a worse platform, a snag here or there, less market share, a worse-thought experience, you have it.
App Store is the best, but it’s still pretty bad.
This is all very, very irritating.
I will not propose changes. It would be a temptation to say “just do this!”, and yet I also know that I know nothing of what's going on in there. There may very well be reasons for this that I don't know and are as good and as compelling as any cry for change I hear in my head.
And yet I also know this cannot go on indefinitely, at least as far as I'm concerned.
I'd love you to find a compromise between reaching your goals and not alienating us. In my heart of hearts, I'm — irrationally, without evidence — sure it's possible. I'd love seeing it happen. You have probably innovated more than half of the other companies on the market in the last ten years. I'm sure that you could also think your way out of this. But, the way things are set up, it must come from you. It has to. We have no idea on what we have to compromise, since you won't talk except in bits and pieces of cleansed marketing speak.
I love what you make. I love using it, and I love making stuff for it, and I fantasize sometimes that I'm making it a tiny bit better with my contribution. Don't let me down. Don't let us down.
Hoping you'll make me proud of working with you,
— Emanuele “∞” Vulcano.
Milan, Italy · November 20th 2009