Another day, another capricious decision by Apple to pull a fairly innocuous application. This time it’s BoxOffice, a diabolical system for finding and displaying local movie times. Quoth the developers at Metasyntactic:
Apple pulled the app yesterday without giving my any notification that they were doing it, or what their justification was for removing it.
I’ve tried to contact them about the issue, but it’s been a complete dead end. If anyone has a useful contact number for apple, please let me know.
I’m in regular contact with all my data providers, and none of them have had an issue with my app. Indeed, the response was the exact opposite. They like my app and have even asked if i would do custom application work for them in the future. Furthermore, all the data i use is licensed by the owners as ‘free for non commercial use’. i.e. precisely what BoxOffice is.
So i’m stuck here not knowing what has happened, or what i can do about it. If any of you have any ideas, please let me know. You can respond here, but i’d actually appreciate a reply at cyrusn@stwing.upenn.edu since i probably won’t check back here that often.
What’s delightful about this whole thing is the random nature of the pulls and reinstatements. Clearly someone at Apple is freaking out every five minutes. I suspect it’s either an overly literalist lawyer (”This game involves placing blocks in a row! The Bricklayers Local 104 in Oakland will sue us for using scab labor!”) or an overly literalist programmer has written a Perl script to scan submitted code for things she considers no-nos.
Netshare’s gone again, too.
Are we sure that these aren’t maintenance issues? It seems to me that they would be in contact with developers (especially if there is a legal issue). Anyways, the focus right now might be on popular applications. I think if Flashlight v0.01Suck went down for a day or two then no one would really notice.
This is why I am waiting for Google Android to come out rather than buying an iPhone. I don’t want Apple or any manufacturer or provider to be able to tell me what I can or can’t do with my phone and my apps.
This may be my pessimistic self talking, but this has conspiracy theory written all over it. There are at least 3 large sites on the web entirely devoted to monetizing movie listings. There’s a very good chance that at least 1 of them is developing an App they plan to make money off of. Your free app would jeopardize that.
Could Apple be pulling free apps in favor of apps that earn money? Could there be some kind of kick-back/revenue share for Apple from this kind of App? Am I just insanely neurotic?
I don’t see it being the pay sites pushing for this to be taken down as there are at least two other free App Store apps that do the same thing!
It wasn’t removed, just renamed
See here: http://code.google.com/p/metasyntactic/
my guess is that these apps are being removed because they are open source
What Apple should be freaking out about is the constant crashing and bricking of the iPhone! In a word on stability, iPhone 2.0 sucks!
Sorry to hear about your 2.0 problems. My 2.0 has only crashed an app once (I’ve downloaded at least 70 apps). I’m totally happy with the app store. I’m sure they are just struggling to keep up with the demand and with that chaos comes little snags like BoxOffice being bumped. Things will ease up in the next month or so I”m sure.
In the last paragraph you say: “I suspect it’s …”
That sums it up. You suspect – you know absolutely nothing. All you have to go on is rumor and your biased conjecture.
Who know, maybe they actually have a good reason for pulling it. What if it IS a programmer who has a Perl script that looks for certain potential security issues in the code either intended or not? So they pull it preemptively. If it checks out they put it back.
Or perhaps there are some reliability issues – should they announce to the world that it is riddled with bugs?
End of the day you are spouting off on that of which you know nothing. You are an idiot masturbating nonsense into the blog.
I don’t get the iPhone closed App Store model at all. I use a Windows Mobile phone that I can install pretty much anything I want on (and there’s a lot of stuff out there – freeware, open source, shareware and commercial) and no-one from Microsoft decides what I can or can’t do (sure some of the carriers Application Lock the devices but most of the places you can find apps will point you to ways to remove the app lock!)
Sure the iPhone is pretty and has a pretty cool UI but the restrictions (approved apps only, no background tasks, reliability etc) don’t fill me with excitement
… I don’t get the iPhone closed App Store model at all. I use a Windows Mobile phone that I can install pretty much anything I want on (and there’s a lot of stuff out there – freeware, open source, shareware and commercial) and no-one from Microsoft decides what I can or can’t do (sure some of the carriers Application Lock the devices but most of the places you can find apps will point you to ways to remove the app lock!)
Sure the iPhone is pretty and has a pretty cool UI but the restrictions (approved apps only, no background tasks, reliability etc) don’t fill me with excitement
… I don’t get the iPhone closed App Store model at all. I use a Windows Mobile phone that I can install pretty much anything I want on (and there’s a lot of stuff out there – freeware, open source, shareware and commercial) and no-one from Microsoft decides what I can or can’t do (sure some of the carriers Application Lock the devices but most of the places you can find apps will point you to ways to remove the app lock!)
Sure the iPhone is pretty and has a pretty cool UI but the restrictions (approved apps only, no background tasks, reliability etc) don’t fill me with excitement
sorry about the triplicate response…. got a “sorry, looks like you’ve already said that” error on the first submission so tried again (because it didn’t appear in the comments).
I guess I was too enthusiastic (must be all that coffee on a Monday!)
Apple is very much dropping the ball for both users and developers. The closed nature of the app store and developer program reminds me of running the gauntlet in gladiators on tv; one hurdle after another. To answer on the communication issue. Apple is doing horribly on communication.
We have applied multiple times to the developer program with no more response than “we will let you know…”. Then when you call the 800 number to check on the very nice people are clueless and have no information what so ever.
We ended up having to submit our application through another developer that was approved. The application was submitted before apple’s deadline to get it into the app store for the launch and it has yet to be approved, declined or even reviewed. It has now been more than 4 weeks, our web based app customers are wondering where the sdk app is. All we can tell them is Apple has it. Competitors meanwhile are gaining share with their apps and overall we are disappointed with apple’s lack of commitment to their developer community.
We have already decided not to proceed with other iphone sdk apps given this extremely poor experience. Why would we spend time and money when we can not even put estimates on when returns on investment would be coming in. On this one application we have spent thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours coding and for apple to not have the decency to put in a public process or commit the resources to reviewing apps is atrocious.
Good bye apple. If you will not take us seriously then we don’t want you as a partner.
The real question is, where the hell do you download demo version s before buying…
My guess is that the egregious sin here is that this app, while free, sports a prominent “donations” button on the setup screen, which leads directly to the developer’s website. Apple may very well consider this an unauthorized workaround to their 30% share of appstore revenues. I predict that this app will reappear with this button removed, but Apple may ask the developer to pay “back taxes” first.