Lacking a better medium to communicate to all my users how difficult Apple is making it to provide them with the level of service I’d want to,  I’ll get my rant out here on my blog where it’s safe.

I had a bugfix version of StickWars ready the same day the buggy version 1.4 was released. That day was May 27th. Is is June 18th and I’m still waiting patiently for Apple take a look at the update. It has been two weeks since I submitted a corrected update, and I haven’t got a lick of feedback back. In the mean time, my app has dropped from #3 to #9, and my users are sitting there wondering what I’m doing when in fact I have two more full-content updates ready for release, completed in the time it took Apple to approve a bugfix release. Keep in mind that my app has been in the top 10 paid apps for months now–this is one of Apple’s moneymaking apps. I would think they would want to work quickly to approve an update which would improve the game experience for hundreds of thousands of players.

Now I am not absolving myself of the responsibility of releasing a version with some problems. The fault for that lies solely on me, and was due to a somewhat chaotic situation as I was moving homes and starting a new full-time job that led to me not having as much time as I expected to test the release. This is no excuse, however, as I should have just rejected the update and resubmitted later after more testing. But the problem was magnified greatly by the simple fact that Apple has no agreement or desire to protect the ability of developers to have control over the applications they are producing. We can’t respond directly to user complaints or support requests posted on the AppStore. Most importantly, our update schedule is 100% subject to the whims and scheduling of Apple, so an update that we kill ourselves to complete on a rapid basis could be live in 3 days, or in 30. And we never know what to expect until after the fact.

Before a couple weeks ago when Apple first started emailing me to let me know that they approved my update, do you know how I would find out my update was live? My as-it-happens google alert would send me an email that a new cracked version of StickWars was available on some blog somewhere. I also rely 100% on third-party tools to tell me how people are responding to my applications. Check out www.appfigures.com to see what I’m talking about–from that site, you can read reviews from all countries. I received a lot of valueable feedback reading through the reviews of other english-speaking nations. Apple provides no way (that I know of) for developers to see the status of their application in the AppStore (if it is featured anywhere, it’s rank in other countries, etc…).

In addition, I’ve only received two of the seven payments for April 2009 that I should have been paid by now. Granted, one of those received was from the US, and therefore was the largest one, but they are sitting there wasting interest on a lot money and I still have not recieved a single response as to why. Three weeks ago I dug through their contact form and sent a polite email asking them why I got the financial report for a few thousands but never received the deposit, but I have yet to receive even as much as an automated reply confirming receipt of my message. I have sent more inquries weekly, and just started sending them to a more broad range of email address, and will update this at some point when I get a response.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Apple has done an amazing job with the AppStore, and building a system like this from scratch is bound to be difficult, with problems like this sprouting up and slowly being fixed month by month. But right now, I seem to find myself trapped at a criticial point, where if another week goes by without Apple looking at my update and StickWars drops off the top 10, and then the many more features and improvements I’ve made in the meantime won’t matter as all the exposure in the AppStore revolves around the top 10 and top 100 lists. I understand that applications have a limited shelf life at the top of the lists, but I didn’t expect mine to be cut short at the end by random and unpredictable update approval practices by the iTunes Store.

I believe that complaining without recommending a course of action to fix the problem is a waste of words, so here are some ideas that I would love to see put into the AppStore.

• A priority queue for update approval based on popularity. The apps that are getting constant updates pushed out to hundreds of thousands of players should have more personal attention from Apple staffers. On the other hand, it should be balanced so that even an unpopular app which has gone two weeks with an update in the queue is bumped up to the top priority.
• A developer portal into iTunes Store “Insights” that gives you access to any information related to the status of your applications, including reviews and rankings (in all categories) from all nations, along with any places where the application is featured.
• More analytic information, so I can see how many users download my Lite version first, and then download the Paid version.
• Allow developers to post short ‘responses’ to user reviews. This way, when somebody complains “the game was too easy wish i could make it harder!!@#” a developer who cares can go through and add a response such as “just hit the options button and set the difficulty to hard” (real example).

Update: I did eventually get paid by Apple like 1 or 2 months late, and about 2 weeks after I got paid I got responses to my multiple emails (sent over a month before) saying “we show your account as paid in full…”. To be fair to Apple, my banking situation was a little complex and I understand that it takes time to go through all that, but I would have appreciated a brief response (or even an automated confirmation) to my inquiries long before almost 2 months have gone by.