News

iPhone tyranny? A developer rebels over video apps

by Guy J Kewney | posted on 17 June 2009

"Over the past two months, Apple has blocked our breakthrough video camera app, iVidCam, and our attempts to dialogue with them." A very upset iPhone developer, GP Apps, has gone public with its battle with Apple's legal department, and has informed the press (including NewsWireless).

NewsWireless doesn't get many such emails, but this does seem to be "public interest" because Apple has been (apparently) behaving inconsistently.

The accusation is simple - that Apple is suppressing a product purely because it might compete with an Apple product:

Several developers have used a particular "undocumented API call" to write software.

Apple has included these apps in its catalogue

GP Apps uses the same call to make iVidCam, a video recorder app for iPhone

Apple has refused to include this app in its catalogue "because it uses this particular API call"

Apple has not withdrawn these other apps which use this particular call

Now Apple has launched a video app, but is requiring its customers to upgrade (for money) the 3Gs before it will work. iVidCam doesn't require the upgrade.

"We have become deeply disappointed by Apple's practice of ignoring developers instead of dialoguing and partnering with us, as they led us to believe they would do," wrote David Lee, founder of GP Apps. "We feel misled, mistreated and overall saddened by Apple."

They've posted on their website, www.gpapps.com, the various communications they've had with VP Phil Schiller (the keynote presenter for WWDC) and his team. "It describes our ordeal with Apple."

Here's how the story starts:

In October, we started development on iVidCam, a video recording app for the iPhone. We invested a lot of capital and resources because we knew if we got a video camera app working, then it would be an instant hit. By January, we had finished the mp4 video encoding engine, but we needed a way to take multiple pictures per second to make video.

In February, our breakthrough came. On the frontpage of the App Store Apple featured 25shot, an app that took 25 pictures in 5 seconds. The app used a custom camera view and took 5 screenshots per second. Our team studied the app and integrated the same function into iVidCam. We saw Apple's featuring 25shot on the front page of the App Store as a signal to developers that this function was highlighted and encouraged by Apple

. But no, it wasn't. The developers claim they were ignored for months. During that time more and more other apps appeared in the appstore, all using the same unpublished API.

Apple's response, as illustrated in that blog, seems to have been to say that they were looking into the other apps. But so far, it hasn't withdrawn them. Nonetheless, it continues to block iVidCam, and promote its own product.

Is this a simple case of corporate bullying, to crowd out a rival? or is it more likely to be an even simpler case of bureaucrats internally who don't care a fig for commercial reality, as long as they check their own procedural boxes?

Tomorrow at WWDC Apple will likely announce their own video camera app or video iphone.