Vetting the App Store approval process

The App Store has been with us for a month now, and, by many measures, it's a roaring success. Apple told the Wall Street Journal that it averages around US$1 million a day in iPhone application sales, for a grand total of around $30 million in the App Store's first month of existence. (Apple keeps only 30 percent of that under its revenue-sharing agreement with app developers, but that's still a nice chunk of change.)

Shoppers have plenty of choices--the App Store launched with more than 500 programs and the number has only swelled since then. And, on a personal note, we find our phones are that much more useful than they were just a couple of months ago, bolstered by software that is generally well-written and offers more capabilities than most of what we got from hacked, third-party programs.

Still, that's not to say there that the App Store has achieved perfection in just 33 days of operation. There are plenty of areas for improvement, with the most pressing issues centering around the process in which iPhone applications win approval from Apple and wind up for sale at the App Store.

Back in March, when Apple announced the iPhone 2.0 software beta, the company gave a rough idea of how that approval process would work. Developers would write the programs, submit them to the App Store, and, once vetted by Apple, the apps would then be available to all iPhone and iPod touch users via either iTunes or on the device itself.

Sign up for ITworld's Daily newsletter
Follow ITworld on Twitter @IT_world

• Email
• Print
• Share
  • Slashdot
  • Digg
  • Stumble
  • Reddit
  • Newsvine