Aw man, I was going to ditch this conversation but I should have figured I couldn't.

I'm tired of people comparing development for Apple with development for the console video game market. They talked about this on Buzz Out Loud a week ago, and had a game developer write in about how it was just as difficult to develop for console companies, and how they'll reject your app for the tiniest little errors like forgetting to capitalize something.

I consequently wrote them an email that they read on the air. My argument (and I'm paraphrasing my email) was that this developer was complaining about the stringency of the requirements the game studios placed upon him, but from what he said himself, he knows those rules up front, and if he does things correctly they game will get through.

The complaint about the App Store is that the approval department is capricious at best. The least of the problems is that you don't know whether your app will be approved while you're developing it. Your app can get approved, you start making money on it, and then get removed later on. The latest was that app that taught kids how to program. To be honest, I agreed with their reasons for not allowing it in the store, because it plainly violated their rules, but it shouldn't have been approved to begin with.

So the primary reason the comparison between App Store approval and game company approval is completely inaccurate is that I've never heard of a game being pulled off every single store shelf because Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Sega, Atari, etc determined after the fact that they didn't like something about it. If it's happened, I'd wager you could count the number of titles on one hand, whereas Apple has pulled hundreds of apps in this manner.

Crap, that was way more time than I wanted to devote to this nonsense. This argument is tiring. I like the iPhone as a product, and the App Store was a brilliant innovation in the world of mobile communication and devices. That doesn't change the fact that Apple's approval process is terrible, and anyone developing for them now has no excuse to be upset if something Apple does completely disrupts their business.