Today, we’ve been informed that Apple has removed Airfoil Speakers Touch from the iOS App Store.1 We first heard from Apple about this decision two days ago, and we’ve been discussing the pending removal with them since then. However, we still do not yet have a clear answer on why Apple has chosen to remove Airfoil Speakers Touch. Needless to say, we’re quite disappointed with their decision, and we’re working hard to once again make the application available for you, our users.

As far as we can tell, Airfoil Speakers Touch is in full compliance with Apple’s posted rules and developer agreements. We’ve already filed an appeal with Apple’s App Review Board, and we’re awaiting further information. Unfortunately, Apple has full control of application distribution on iOS, leaving us with no other recourse here.

As some users may recall, we have been through this before, with Airfoil Speakers Touch no less. We hope to be able to resolve things in similar fashion, and once again provide you with this top-notch tool.

After several years and 13 million users, Apple summarily removed iKamasutra from the App Store on February 20, 2012, ostensibly for adding brown hair coloring to our drawings. Then, on March 14, it was just as arbitrarily pulled from the Google Play Store. I have been trying to understand Apple's and Google's sudden concerns and address them, but with limited feedback and no real dialog from them, despite all our efforts, our options have dwindled.
In fairness to the millions of users who purchased the app and have been emailing us asking why they can't restore their purchases, why other apps have copied our designs and icons, and what the future is for iKamasutra, I'm writing this blog post. I hope to address all those concerns, and give a little insight into the daunting task independent developers face in all the app stores for mobile devices.
iKamasutra is (or was) available for virtually every mobile device on each app store, so we have a unique perspective. I understand that ultimately Apple and Google have high standards for the apps in their respective stores, and frankly so do we, so it is unfortunate to see them make decisions that undermine those very guidelines and hurt their users.

The Mac App Store has been a huge boon to Mac software developers, but has an enormous flaw: it needs to allow developers to charge existing customers a discounted price for major upgrades.

Right now developers selling through the Mac App Store face a lose/lose choice: either provide all major upgrades to existing customers for free (thus losing a quarter of our revenue), or create a “new” product for each major version (creating customer confusion) and charge existing customers full price again (creating customer anger).

While the focus of Wednesday's Apple event was primarily on "the new iPad" and the perpetual hobby that is the Apple TV, we would be remiss to forget iOS 5.1. Past point releases of the OS included notable improvements like Game Center in iOS 4.1, and the Nitro JavaScript engine, better Home Sharing, and Personal Hotspots in iOS 4.3. While Apple updated apps, and released the stunning iPhoto for iOS, how is iOS 5.1 itself likely to be compared to past releases? To some, it will be a little disappointing. 

With the help of Ars's Macintosh Achaia to refine the points for this article, here are ten annoyances that will remain with us as part of iOS—at least until the next iOS release rolls around.

Take, for example, the case of iOS developer Anton Sinelnikov. By looking at the screenshot taken a few weeks ago, you are faced with an incredible feat. Sinelnikov has managed to create not just one popular iOS app, but several! Hits like Plants vs. Zombies, Temple Run, Tiny Wings and Angry Birds, all coming from one developer!

Oh. Wait a second. My mistake, it turns out that instead of coming up with original ideas, Sinelnikov takes a different strategy. He copies other applications, takes a similar name, and then forces the application into the Top 100 list, where users mistake it for the original app. After a day or so, Apple notices that these apps aren’t actually providing they promise and kick the apps out, but not before users spend tens of thousands of dollars on the apps – money that the developers get to keep, as users rarely ask for a refund.

Of course, this wouldn’t be such a big deal if it was one developer, but the problem is that close to a dozen scam apps have made their way into the Top lists on the iOS App Store, netting a veritable fortune for the scammers. Some developers have been pointing this out for a while, asking Apple to fix the situation and be proactive. Apple has yet to respond with the needed force.

We honestly thought we had satisfied all of Apple’s complaints about Air Dictate. But what we failed to anticipate is that they might just totally make up an excuse to reject Air Dictate 2.0, for the sheer sport of it.

Drafting this one for 2014, because we like to write our blog posts a couple years early at Impending. Let’s hope I’ll never have to dig it up again.

As we’ve learned from Apple’s latest earnings call, App Store revenue growth for developers has begun to stall and slip behind device sales, resulting in many beloved indie studios closing shop or selling to larger companies, folding to the pressure and tighter profit margins.

Considering the past two years with hundreds of scams, fraud apps, hoaxes, and clones that have hit the top of the charts, it’s no surprise the atmosphere in 2014 among both App Store customers and app developers can only be described as cynical.

Most significantly, what we once took for granted before 2012, the “impulse buy”, has largely evaporated. Consumer trust in apps is now completely broken, and even customer reviews can’t be trusted due to more and more elaborately sleazy services for hire to game the system. In this fallout, we have come to understand how important the impulse buy was in a market environment dominated by rock bottom pricing. Developers have raised app pricing to compensate, kicking into effect a feedback loop resulting in sustaining revenue (for now) but plummeting sales, reach and cultural relevance for popular apps.

Customers have also in turn begun to rely more and more heavily on existing giant brands, and are avoiding less trustworthy upstarts, independent developers and studios, and apps that stray from the familiar. As a result innovation in the App Store is in a slow death spiral.

I remember early in 2012, which we can now recognize as the peak of an App Store bubble, when what felt like a utopia took a distinct left turn for the worse with the first wave of scams. Now that we’re stuck in this hole, the road to recovery, if it exists at all, will be painful and take years of education and pro-active improvements from Apple.

The program is available directly from Bare Bones or on the Mac App Store. Due to Apple’s App Store restrictions, there are a few BBEdit features you won’t find in the App Store version. BBEdit has the ability to edit and save files for which you might normally not have permission (for example, files owned by root). Apple doesn’t allow that, so if you need that ability, it’s better to purchase BBEdit from Bare Bones. The App Store version also lacks tools that allow you to use BBEdit’s functions from the command line; a package that adds this ability is downloadable from Bare Bones.

Apple announced today that, starting in March 2012, all apps on the Mac App Store will be required to run in the so-called “App Sandbox”.

The sandbox is an environment that locks down the Mac in ways that match (and exceed) the limitations found on iOS. A sandboxed app doesn’t have direct access to any files or frameworks on the system. It can’t access the network or any devices.

For the app, nothing else exists on the system except for those files and APIs that the operating system explicitly makes accessible to it:



By default, the sandboxed app doesn’t really have anything of its own. Even files in its own Application Support subfolder may be deleted by the operating system if it wants to e.g. reclaim some disk space. The sandbox analogy is quite fitting indeed — inside it, an app’s data has all the permanence of a sand castle.

"Artists should use git," Greg told me one day, and I didn't believe him at first. But it's true: the programmer classes have version control, permanent history, easy collaboration, and "The Cloud" while the more creative types are stuck with ~/Desktops full of "Site mockup-round 2 FINAL tuesdayrev.jamesversion #3 actuallyfinal.tweaks.psd" files. (Or Adobe Bridge. Haha.)

But Greg and I saw an out: GitHub, a social network purpose-built around versioning and collaboration with stellar usability, and the iPad, the end-user right-brain machine to end them all. Even artists should be able to use git, we reasoned, if properly covered in a glossy coating of iOS! I set to code.

This is the story of how that weekend hack became a summer-long ordeal, as we found ourselves caught constantly on the wrong corner of three-way fights—reviewers vs. appeals board, Apple vs. GitHub—that Apple, eventually and inevitably, wins.

You may recall Seth Willits, whose app QuickPick was rejected from the Mac App Store for being “confusingly similar” to 10.7’s Launchpad. Even though QuickPick has been shipping for years before Launchpad and also runs on 10.6.
Seth submitted a formal appeal to Apple’s App Review Board on April 7 2011. After seven weeks Apple denied his appeal. Seth asked for a supervisor, was promised contact info, but never received it.

Our flagship app, iTeleport, is priced at $25 on the App Store, and our sales data shows that it's earned more than $1,000 a day.  How did we get here?

The App Store has been out for almost two years now.  There are almost 200k apps and over 38k developers (source).  As the store has grown, one of the prevailing memes has been: you need to have a low price, high volume app to succeed in the App Store.  As the number of apps has grown, visibility has become increasingly difficult, and so the logic is that developers need to get their apps in the Top 100 charts to get visibility, which will then drive volume.  To get into the Top 100, however, you need to drop your prices, because your competitors on the store are willing to do that.  This creates a vicious cycle that drops prices across the board, and makes it very difficult to create a sustainable, long-term business on the App Store without having a "hit" app.  Some have argued that while there are some apps that are successful with a relatively high price, they are all big brands that have their own marketing machines, or get preferential treatment from Apple in getting on the Featured or What's Hot charts.

We'd like to debunk all of these myths.  And we're going to do it with real data.  Our app is called iTeleport (formerly Jaadu VNC).

I went to buy Angry Birds on Topherchris’ recommendation and got this:

The first two are real. Rocket Bird 3D and MY BEST FRIEND are other things (although probably keyword spammers). The other six of the top ten results for this game’s name are pure spam. Judging from the number of customer ratings, a lot of people are downloading them — and, reading the reviews, it looks like they’re mostly scams and ripoffs.

The reason the app store is there has nothing to do with money, control or quality. The reason the app store exists is to make it easy on the average user. You're not that person, you're a techie, you know a lot, you can handle the various things the world of ones and zeroes throws at you. Congrats, you are the exception and not the rule.

Most people aren't like you. They aren't, necessarily, incapable; they just don't care. They've got things like girlfriends and kids to worry about. For those folks, the vast majority, they don't want control they want convenience. You already know this because chances are you're tech support for everyone around you.

Apple knows this more than you. You get a few calls a week and Apple gets hundreds of calls an hour. If you want to make the iPad easy, and Apple does, you have to control the variables. Controlling the variables means controlling the App Store.