My Frame Update

Since a lot of people have been asking, allow me to give you a brief update on the My Frame issue. At 12.30pm today Central Australian Time Apple removed our application from the store . This is bad of course, but at least it puts to rest all the conspiracy theorists who say this was a PR stunt. Honestly you’d have to be pretty stupid to ruin your entire development career on a stunt like that, so I have no idea why people would even jump to that conclusion, but this is the internet after all.

Apple did not call us, or send us any emails explaining what happened. In fact if you ignore Steve’s reply to my enquiry, we’ve had NO official written correspondence with Apple whatsoever, so far they have yet to put anything in writing.

So how do we feel? I should start with the obligatory Alice in Wonderland quote:

We’re all mad here

That pretty much sums up our feelings. When I say ‘our’ I’m talking about the developers and designers who worked damn hard on My Frame. Groundhog’s official position is a little more measured, but is definately worth explaining:

So for what it’s worth we only want 2 things from Apple. Clarity & Consistency. That’s it, then let us do our job and ultimately the customer will decide if we did it well.

Clarity about what we can and can’t do or develop before we spend 100s of hours and tens of thousands of dollars doing what we believe to be right.

Clarity when we’ve done something wrong as to exactly what it was and how do we fix it.

Consistency of communication and process. As an enterprise software development company, we spend half our lives working with clients to educate them about this.

Apple for one should know that software development succeeds or fails on the basis of shared understanding of requirements, consistently applied process and clarity of communication.

So when is it ever acceptable to make up the rules as you go along, don’t communicate change of requirements until you feel like it, and then to threaten to retrospectively penalise

anyone who inadvertently broke the rules they weren’t informed about.

Pretty reasonable I think.

I’d like to devote this final paragraph to all those people who wrote to us, spread the word about our removal and even bought our application while it was still in the store. We were overwhelmed and humbled by your efforts. Last time I checked we’d been covered in Slashdot, Reddit, The Guardian, Macworld Australia, TechCrunch and many, many other news sources. Also our last blog entry was read by over 50,000 people, so we really appreciate it. I hope we can resolve it with Apple, I really do, but my love of their products and former ‘fanboy’ status is now shattered. You can’t get that back trust and devotion once it’s lost. My next phone may well be branded HTC and my next laptop may well have Thinkpad written on it. That’s not going to hurt Apple one little bit, but it will certainly make me feel better.