My first thought on reading Marcus Zarra's post — and Jeff LaMarche's follow up — on the iOS development community's response to the release of The Daily app was to Tweet "Whoa. So The Daily app was basically written by the iOS dev equivalent of The Travelling Wilburys?". My next, well...
I am a salaried iOS developer working for a reasonably big-name company. (I won't name them here, but if you're really interested in who they are — perhaps you'd like to take a shot at getting me fired — you can find out with only a couple of clicks. And if I write the post I'm planning for later today, you probably won't even need to do that.) I have worked on apps for some fairly well-known brands and personalities. I'm not sure there's one of them I'm totally happy with — which couldn't have been much better if only I'd been given more time to polish, or if certain design decisions hadn't been made. I'm going to be attending a couple of iOS dev conferences later in the year and I really hope there's some kind of amnesty scheme in place because otherwise I'm likely to get a well-deserved slapping from the likes of Matt Gemmell or Mike Lee. So I can understand where Marcus is coming from — I imagine what he had to put up with was an order or two of magnitude worse. But...
This is the bit I have to qualify by saying that I've never used The Daily app. It isn't available in the UK and I don't have a US iTunes account. But I read the same press coverage as everyone else, where people whose opinion I respect mentioned that there were certain flaws with the app. I also read that most of these were fixed in later updates. Great.
The iOS-slash-Mac developer community is, as Marcus observes, a wonderful thing. It's most of the reason I got involved in the first place. (It wasn't until the iPhone came along that it was actually possible for me to turn this into a full-time job.) It is a community of craftsmen, each more than happy to share trade secrets with their peers. But what it has never been — and it's possible that I'm accusing Marcus of having rose-tininted specs here — is some kind of uncritical, mutual appreciation society. There has always been criticism. Bad design and bad implementation has always been called out. If the only notable difference your app offers over its dozen competitors is that its window smokes while it's working, you will be openly ridiculed.
If there were problems with The Daily app, falling standards of politeness within the community shouldn't be blamed for attention being drawn to them. The buck always stops with the developer. So instead of complaining, admit things could have gone better. Maybe explain a little about the kinds of pressure you were under to deliver — those of us who are in the same boat will nod along in understanding, while those who get to work without deadlines and idiot management can feel glad they're not in your shoes. And then knuckle down to making the 1.1 as best you can, given the same constraints of time and resources.
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