The approval system of Apple has been in the news this year more often then previous years. According to the complaints the system is slow and developers don’t get any insight at all. Many developers had to wait weeks (sometimes even months) before their application was finally approved and showed up in the App Store. To give the developers some insight and a little bit more bearable, Apple made a tracking system which shows the steps to follow before the app gets approved.

» Apple Gives Developers More Insight With Tracking System

Many developers complain about the huge amount of time it takes Apple to approve an application. After submitting the application it usually takes a lot of time before it appears in the App Store. This can be very annoying because the developer can give no releasedate to it’s users. Apple seems to have found something to give the developers a better estimation when an app will be released.

» App Store Review Status

Apple has asked iPhone developers to add keywords to their applications. The developers can use 255 characters seperated by comma’s. Those keywords will be used with the search operations in the App Store from an iPhone and iPod Touch. The developers have to fill in the keywords as quickly as possible via iTunes Connect, to make sure the apps will stay findable.

» Apple Needs Keywords For Apps

On February 11th the guys from Ripdev released a new application called Kali Anti-Piracy. This system helps the developers to protect their applications from being pirated.
» Ripdev: How Kali Anti-Piracy Works

Everybody will agree that the App Store is actually a very cool opportunity for a developers. But some developers are having some issues with their created applications. Some of them are very buggy, the reason for this is mainly the lack of good debugging tools according to them. However this is not the only problems the developers have with the App Store. Apple’s is keeping super-tight control over app distribution, and getting updates pushed to the App Store is taking much longer then the developers would like.
» App Store – Developers are rumbling over slow distribution of updates.

Some days ago i had a very interesting meeting with the people from iPhoneClub.nl. We were mainly speculating what the iPhone is going to bring us in the near future, especially with firmware 2.0 and the appstore coming up. After talking for about an hour we decided it might be nice if we asked the developers their point of view regarding the upcoming appstore and the future of jailbreaking. After some quick decisions regarding the questions, I briefly wrote a e-mail addressed to several developers.
» iPhone developers talk about appstore and their applications