About a day after releasing the game, I got a mail saying basically “well, you got my money, but I can’t play your app because it crashes.”
To me, this feels like getting punched in the stomach: Somebody gave you his or her money, and the app doesn’t work because you screwed up or didn’t test enough or didn’t think of some special case. They have every right to be pissed off, because you basically stole their money.
So says a Swiss programmer called Lukas Mathis about his first app for iPhone, a game called Goo Gun. His fascinating blog post reveals some of the pressures that result when a single coder, like him, releases a program for sale on a global marketplace.
Though his app is essentially sound, it’s subject to the vast range of conditions in which the 20-odd million iPhones (and lord knows how many iPod Touches) presently at large operate. Whether users have reset their machines to clear memory of unnecessary data and application processes, which can lead to the few cases of crashes and low memory warnings his game was throwing up. Whether users have installed the latest version of the phone’s operating system. Or whether they’ve been jailbroken – that is, whether the user has cracked the security on their iPhone in order to have freedom to install any program they like on it.
The latter condition can mean that the iPhone’s memory and resources can be eaten up by software that Apple has not certified, constricting other programs’ operations, but not that many users would know about that. And their natural reaction is to question the quality of the software they’ve paid for.
It’s a circumstance that throws up two interesting questions. The first is the legitimacy of cracking closed platforms like iPhone. It’s easy to feel that any product you’ve bought is yours and thereby believe you should have complete freedom over what you do with it. With that in mind, Apple’s control over what you can and can’t install on your iPhone is highly questionable. But Mathis’ predicament illustrates a convincing argument for such restraint – control the conditions and you have a chance to present a unified platform for programmers like him to create products for.
The other is the effect that the App Store has had in giving ‘bedroom’ programmers unparalleled closeness to the public. Without the resources of a large publisher behind them, they don’t have anything like the opportunity to test and hone their products against the vast array of conditions to which their apps will be exposed. And that leaves them exposed to the slings and arrows of public reaction – whether written for all to see on the App Store or sent in personal messages.
For all his fundamental confidence in his game, Mathis blames himself, but he sees the bigger picture. I wonder how well other programmers take it.
That’s open-platform gaming, sadly. I’ve never seen a PC game released where the support forum isn’t overflowing with hate, for reasons that could be anything from dodgy device driver to dubious Windows mods to having bought a pirate version of the software.
1.) I dont think Apples stance is that questionable, since its applying the same kind of controls to use of their own software that any other developers would do. No user is ever affected in how they use the piece of software they have bought “out of the box”, they have that freedom. Its just about how they use it with other software and how far the developer feels prepared to go to support that need. At the complete opposite end of the scale, there are high-end products, with huge development and test budgets, who will not permit anything at all to be installed alongside their software- and those purchasing it would buy into that on the basis that it will provide greater stability.
2.) Which then suggests an issue of informing the market. iPhone developers should be comfortable in putting the same caveats against their software as any other developer might, thus protecting themselves from the myriad possibilities that their testing cannot hope to cover. Similarly, the end-user ought to be familiar with end user license agreements.- just because it only costs 99p doesnt mean its potential damage isnt worth substantially more. That said, those who have jailbroken their iPhone are probably more aware than any of this potential danger.
3.) Surely the App Store is the answer to this and not the problem. Since the iPhone is already locked, then the only route into and out of the iPhone, where software installation is concerned, is via the App Store. Therefore Apple have created a suitable quality control portal to ensure the ongoing stability of their hardware. They are effectively the publisher, taking a cut of the royalties, they have the infrastructure to carry out a far wider level of testing than the original developer, they control what is released, so any issues of quality control should rest with them for not suitably managing what they have created.