About Waveboard iPhone 2.0 Review
Sorry, I have bad news. I was constrained to upload a new binary for Waveboard/iPhone and therefore loose another week in the review process of Apple. I will explain why this was needed and what considerations have lead to this decision.
Push Notification
The Push Notification feature I will introduce in Waveboard 2.0 is based on the Google Robot technology. You add a robot to a wave and it will send you notifications if the wave contents change. See these videos for more informations.
The last weeks the Google Wave Robots were not usable because there was a bug on Googles side that kept me from finishing my work on the robot. Also the rejection last week because of private API use in relation to the included Three20 software stopped my work here.
This all lead to the introduction of a bug that made Push Notification unusable in the version I submitted to Apple and therefore I replaced it with a fixed version today. But please notice my considerations too:
Obstruction through AppStore Review Process
As you might already have noted I’m not a friend of the AppStore review process. In my opinion this is a totally useless process that is more a censorship than anything else. Technically there is no need for such a process since apps are running in closed sandboxes anyway and free access to private data like address book should better be controlled by the operations system (why don’t they do that?) than by the review team. Often they just kick off apps because of their contents e.g. the threw out the very popular german Stern Magazine App because of nudity (in Europe nudity is something considered natural…) but they let in Adolf Hitlers “Mein Kampf” (of which publication and use of nazi symbols is punished by jail up to 3 years in Germany; the app has been removed after some days at least).
Make the Choice
But that’s not the point in this case. I had to decide to loose another week in the AppReview process (it usually takes from 2 weeks minimum up to many months and is total in-transparent) or to have a non working app in the AppStore. Usually as a free developer without limitations, e.g. if developing for MacOS, I just create the update, put it on my web server and after two days all copies are updated by automatic update. But you cannot with the AppStore. I know a lot of stories where developers already have send a bugfix release to Apple but in the meanwhile they get bad press and bad votes because of the bugs. But it is not in their hands! And therefore I decided to replace the app in review, even if it then took more than a month since I already finished the new updates.
