Nov 19, 2009
Paul Graham is whining about the App Store. It’s the whine du jour amongst the blogerati: the review process is broken, developers will flee, the ecology will disintegrate without a constant stream of new applications, the sky will fall, humans will be sacrificed, dogs and cats will live together. You know the drill.
I am sure no one, not even the most loyal employee inside Apple, believes the App Store review process is even near perfect. There are human beings involved and subjective decisions required: mistakes will be made.
So, why should Paul care enough to post?
Simple: the App Store review process throws a big ol’ monkey wrench into the grinding gears of his beloved development process. The key paragraph:
Apparently Apple’s attitude is that developers should be more careful when they submit a new version to the App Store. They would say that. But powerful as they are, they’re not powerful enough to turn back the evolution of technology. Programmers don’t use launch-fast-and-iterate out of laziness. They use it because it yields the best results. By obstructing that process, Apple is making them do bad work, and programmers hate that as much as Apple would.
Paul’s obviously a big fan of the Agile movement. But let’s face some ugly truths:
Agile is not about quality.
Agile is not about efficiency.
Agile is about power.
The micro-bureaucrat née programmer has never had much control over his life. The deploy-first-deploy-often model cuts the unpleasant QA step out of the development process, which gives the programmer direct power over the end user. A QA department can criticize him, can have his sorry ass fired; all the beta mob can do is whine and beg for updates.
The review phase is not going to produce bad work.
The review phase is going to produce work free from unnecessary and untested features.
This is what programmers hate the most: being forced to work on things that are not fun. That’s 90% of the reason for software bloat: that there is no oversight, no adult to warn about losing an eye. Either the manager of a project is technical, or he is not. If the manager is an ex-programmer, he hates having to manage. He does not want to alienate the developers: he wants to be their friend. A non-technical manager can afford to be aloof, but his lack of technical knowledge allows him to be easily snowed. A technically skilled manager who is able to say “no” is a rare bird indeed.
Iteration is impossible here: the developer gets one shot, and if he screws it up then the reviews will be mostly negative and his little application will fall off the bottom of the list. Apps for the iPhone may be delivered via the web, but they are still shrink-wrapped software: the rules are different from web-based applications.
Apple is not going to lose the best developers.
Apple is going to lose the rockstar programmers.
Apple is going to lose the programmers that blog, that twitter, that whine, that post to Slashdot and Stack Overflow. Apple is going to lose those Internet celebrities whose sole purpose is to dribble fame onto the nameless hordes that adore them. These are people that have to produce a constant stream of updates lest they lose the spotlight to which they are desperately addicted. Apple will be far better off once they move to the next big thing.
Apple understands software.
Apple understands that software is not about the means it is produced.
Apple understands that software is about the user.
Granted, they’ve made mistakes in the past. But what we’re seeing is an observer effect: the developers who whine about the review process are the ones who were rejected for an absurd reason. Nobody is going to blog about how they were shot down legitimately. Nobody ever admits culpability: not Apple, not the developer, no one.
Apple doesn’t give a damn about making life easier for programmers.
Apple makes life easier for customers.
Graham writes:
One way to appeal to programmers is with software. If you could think of an application programmers had to have, but that would be impossible in the circumscribed world of the iPhone, you could presumably get them to switch.
This is the same myth that has led Linux, despite its power and economy, to fail time and time again in being the desktop of choice. It does not understand the common man; it is built by developers for developers to develop with and upon. Eric Raymond can blog until he’s blue in the face about how nigh impossible Linux is for the non-technical user, but it falls on deaf ears. Simplicity isn’t fun.
People are whining because Apple is succeeding despite constant predictions that it was destined to fail because Apple does not follow the arbitrary rules set by the “developer community.” Just as the Windows crowd complains that the support Apple receives from its customers is merely from a cult of personality, just as the Cluetrain people gnash their teeth because Apple has huge mindshare despite never holding a “conversation” with their customers, the Agile proponents are livid because Apple is succeeding despite ignoring every tenet of their beloved manifesto.
You can’t argue with success. And in the end, the best developers — the steady, responsible, modest, trustworthy developers — simply demand renumeration for their work. And that, much to Graham’s chagrin, is exactly what the App Store will give them.