App Store is a place where all of us have faced at least one inconvenience as a developer or as a simple iPhone user. Do not try to contradict me here as I have tons of evidence to prove my point. This write up exposes the other side of the App Store success story, where we have more than 65,000 unhappy applications, more than 100,000 unsatisfied developers and more than 45 million pissed off iPod touch and iPhone users. 

The root cause of all resentments with App Store is Apple’s opaque like relationship with iPhone app developers and iPhone users. For developers, the concern starts right from the time of writing the first line code of an application. Apple has no clear guidelines outlining the dos and don’ts for developers. Framing one is difficult, I know that, but if there weren’t mass rejection for reasons best known to the company, the need for guidelines is minimized. 

Next comes the wait for approval. For some, the approval time comes down to just a week, but for most the waiting time spans even to a month. That’s long now. Even if the wait had been painfully long, there is no assurance that the app/game would be approved. There have been instances where Apple finally told developers that their app/game have been rejected when the dev had already waited for a month or so. 

A developer friend recently told me that his application was rejected twice, first on the ground that it contains copyrighted content and second Apple cited the description was confusing. Well, at the time of the first rejection, the application reportedly had the same description. This simply suggest that people out there are addicted to playing the delay tactic.

The same delay tactic is applied when developers give updates of their applications already in the App Store. Some applications are even rejected when they are already in the store for more than a week or a month. GV Mobile would be an ideal example here. As it is their store, Apple seem to think that they can pull anyone down without hurting people’s sentiments. 

The cited issues are as old as the App Store itself. 

There are new issues and problems coming to the surface. Recently, developers whose applications are rated 17+ were unable to generate promo codes for their applications. After mass criticism for the ban, Apple silently removed the restrictions. Not a bad deal huh!

The latest issue with App Store is the mysterious disappearance of application descriptions. This is not a very common problem, but it does exist. It is just that developers decide to remain silent when this kind of annoying things happen. Could be because the App Store is becoming overloaded lately.

When would App Store get out from these mess? Or would issues increase with the increase in applications?