Quote:
Originally Posted by popesammyjoe
I'm sure you'll fix every issue, but you still owe everyone an apology.
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I think people need to keep a few things in mind about all iPhone software before posting like this.
1. It was an entirely new platform built using an Apple SDK that was in flux right until the moment that Apple released the iPhone 3G (and probably still is).
2. The NDA on the SDK prevented any developers from communicating with each other about their work so issues that one group found could not be communicated to anyone else other than Apple. So if a developer didn't happen across some of the myriad number of bugs in the OS during their software's development, they had no means of learning of them from other sources and therefore would have been bitten by them only once their app got into the wild.
3. The NDA prevented extensive testing of any of the apps that appeared on the store on day one and it still does. At the very most, e.g. OmniGroup could only test it on tens of iPhones and that assumes that they had that many in-house to do so. It couldn't have been tested on any iPhone 3Gs for the obvious reason that it wasn't available at the time.
4. The design of the App store prevents public beta testing of software using an official beta-testing route. In essence, every app you download is a beta because of this and will continue to be a beta until this problem is solved by Apple.
5. The iPhone OS 2.0 is still very much in a beta-state itself, which is obvious to anyone who looks at the crash logs it generates - even Apple's own apps crash frequently. The main flaw is so obvious that one developer even goes so far as to let its users know at launch that their app is very likely to crash because of it (memory management and Aurora Feint).
Etc. Etc.
If it feels like people have been beta-testing the iPhone software since its release, then it isn't entirely OmniGroup's or any other iPhone developer's fault, and it is largely Apple's. However, Apple had good reasons for the approach they have taken and it has mostly worked, but there are now some self-evident flaws to the whole process that need to be corrected. The most obvious one that needs a solution fast is how cripplingly slow the posting of software updates to the App store is. End-users should not be suffering week plus delays for fixes that the developers have already submitted.
Should OmniGroup be apologising for something that was largely beyond their control? Well, if it makes you feel better...