Tom, I had mostly the same reactions as you, although I'm far more anti-Apple on the whole thing. I'll admit, Google wussed out majorly here, and I'm really disappointed in them, but I'm actually angry over Apple's response here. The whole "oh, hey, no, it's not actually rejected, we're still reviewing it! and hey, we were just protecting everyone the whole time! bye bye!" Every podcast I've listened to has compared Apple to a little child that got its hand caught in a cookie jar, making rambling excuses to try to get out of it.

Tom, you should have mentioned the part where Apple describes how great it is that they protected their users from Google's dangerous app, by claiming it does things that it doesn't actually do:

- They claim it completely takes over phone and sms from the iPhone and makes it all free. Untrue. It does make sms to and from your GV number free, and makes international calling with your GV number cheaper, but it doesn't have a single thing to do with calls and sms to your AT&T number.

- They claim that all the contacts on a user's iPhone are automatically, and without the user's knowledge, uploaded to Google's servers for use with Google Voice. Apparently, hearing from users who had the app briefly, this is just plain untrue.

Ugh, the whole thing annoys me. Frankly I can see why AT&T would be annoyed by this app, seeing as how it does, in fact, let you send free SMS messages, obviating the need for a text message plan, but of course this isn't the issue here. I'm still not sold on AT&T's claims that they had nothing to do with it. If Apple's the little kid who got caught, AT&T is the sibling who happened to be in the same room at the time, and there's no way to tell if it coerced the sibling into getting those cookies.


On a completely separate note, two weeks is a long time for your app to be in approval. In that time, a developer's app could have been on the Android market for...two weeks. And that's actually two weeks plus an apparent 1 in 5 chance that it'll be longer than that.

Compare this to the recent report that apparently only 1% of apps from the Google App Market get removed from the market (100% get on in the first place). That comes to about 60 apps, and supposedly those are mostly removed for offensive and malicious reasons. Naturally, I can understand why the install base of Android phones is less appealing to developers, but I've got to imagine that the lack of any hassle from Apple would be appealing as well.


My ultimate hope is that this will force Apple to be more open about the approval process. I think everyone has wanted real reasons for app rejections, and for the app store to be more open than it is.

The overarching reason I've been hearing from Apple for why this all exists is that they're trying to protect the experience the users have with their phones. Okay, that's fine, but what if the user wants to opt out of Apple's loving oversight (like Bitt was saying)? On my Android phone, I have the option to check a box in the settings that lets me install software from other sources, so I could just install an app from someone's web site, bypassing the app market entirely.