App store rejection letters under NDA

Via MacRumours:

Apparently, Apple has now started labeling their rejection letters with Non-Disclosure (NDA) warnings:
THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS MESSAGE IS UNDER NON-DISCLOSURE— MacRumours

Apple is really, really pushing the limits of peoples’ tolerance with this now. I love your products Steve & co, but you need to get a grip on this before it becomes a deal-breaking issue.

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This app should be free

Like pretty much every iPhone 2.0 user, I have spent a bit of time recently browsing through the app store. Whilst I’m not entirely comfortable with some aspects of it’s distribution model, overall I’ve got to say it’s a pretty sweet way to find and download applications.

If I’m unsure about an app, I’ll check out the reviews. Any commenting system like this always has a small proportion of idiots on there, but for the most part I’ve found the reviews helpful (although generally the total star rating is less useful than the individual comments). However there is one type of comment that really annoys me, and I have seen it a countless number of times in the reviews of some of the simpler, cheaper applications on the app store:

“This app should be free.”

Excuse me? Should be free? Why is that exactly?

Any developer who puts their time into building an application, for whatever platform, is entitled to seek some renumeration for that effort. If they price their application too high, they won’t sell much. If they price it too low they may not make the profit they desire. But that is for the market to decide, and their success at the price they choose will essentially be dictated by the relative quality and usefulness of their application. No-one should feel guilty for charging the price of a can of coke for an app, even an incredibly simple one. They have to pay to get accepted into the developer program and their programs listed on the app store, remember.

It is absolutely NOT the place of someone who has never written a line of code in their life to criticize a developer for charging a small fee for their application. Even a simple one takes time to code, test, submit to the app store and maintain. But some people just don’t get this.

Why is this type of comment so prevalent on the app store but completely absent from online shops like Amazon? Because there has been a precedent set on the app store whereby some applications, even fairly complex ones, have been distributed for free. But the fact that one developer has decided to give the fruits of his labours away should have no bearing on another developer’s pricing. In fact often the free apps are a way of selling the other ‘paid’ applications that the developer offers for the desktop platform, so they may even increase the developers revenue in the long run.

So no, this application should not be free. If you think otherwise then maybe you should think about how much your time is worth, and when you last gave some of that time to producing something to give away to others. Not recently, I’ll wager.

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