Seems that publicizing app store woes is the latest and greatest way to get Apple’s attention, and the latest iPhone developer to throw his hat into the proverbial ring is former Digg developer Joe Stump, whose latest update to his Chess Wars app has been in limbo for 6 weeks now.
A couple of months ago we released Chess Wars, which allows you to play your Facebook friends via Facebook Connect on your iPhone. When it was released we found a few show stopping bugs that neither us nor Apple found which kept new users from playing the game. Whoops. We pushed 1.1 a few weeks later only to find that there were problems for other new users. Again none of this was caught by us or Apple. As they say, shit happens. We quickly put together a release and submitted it to Apple about 6 weeks ago.
Silence.
Finally, after weeks of waiting I did what I’d tried hard to avoid at all cost; I contacted the friends I knew at Apple who told me to email the submitters. Canned response.
If I’m not mistaken, Chess Wars hit the app store on July 20, 2009. So basically it’s been out for a little over a month, and has already been tripped up by 2 significant bugs in a matter of 2 weeks. Stump writes that his development team is getting f’d by Apple because they haven’t gotten back to them in 6 weeks.
Does Stump have a point, or is he being overly dramatic in an attempt to get Apple’s attention? I’m leaning towards the latter, but it might also be due to the fact that I’m not planning on downloading Chess Wars anytime soon.
September 2nd, 2009 at 1:47 am
The argument that there has to be a significantly more efficient way for already-approved apps to be updated by their developers and made available to their users is an absolutely compelling one.
I’m not sure the developer who shipped a product with, apparently, at least 3 “show-stopping” bugs ought to be the poster child for the argument.