App Store's growing pains

Apple's App Store has been facing a lot of bad publicity in the last couple of weeks. The two main reasons have been the increasing (but still remote) number of cases of exploding iPhones, but perhaps more important for the platform, the ban of the new Google Voice application.

While the first issue might scare some consumers away, the cases have been isolated and are 'being looked into'. It is unlikely that iPhone sales will suffer too much from that. What's more worrying is the recent ban of Google Voice app from the App Store. This ban is not only making the FCC representatives raise an eyebrow, it makes App Store developers rebel.

Apple's loyal community of developers has helped it make App Store the phenomenal success that it has become in the year since its launch. Without wishing to go too deep into App Store figures, I will just quickly go through some of the numbers of this (still) unprecedented success in the mobile industry. App Store reached 1 billion downloads in only 9 months since launch; currently, with just over a year passed, more than 1.5 billion applications have been downloaded by users on a handset base covering only four models (iPod Touch, iPhone 2.5 GSM, iPhone 3G and the new iPhone 3GS) and around 50 million (my own very rough estimations, will get back with more official numbers) handsets worldwide. In the eve of the billionth download, Moconews used the online counter to come up with some basic, but impressive calculations: about 100 apps were being downloaded each second, translating into 6,000 per minute, 360,000 per hour and no less than 8.6 million per day.

This impressive growth rate is fueled by a constant upload of new applications, provided by App Store's developer base. 148apps.com estimated in an older statistics that around 1,000 games and 4,000 non games apps are being submitted each month. Currently, there are more than 65,000 applications available for users to download.

I think that such numbers, while impressive, show that the App Store is growing too fast for Apple to handle. Apple has kept a firm grip on the catalog from the beginning, but the app review and acceptance process has never quite been clear. There have been several cases of apps rejected from the App Store for quite bizarre reasons.

The recent ban of Google Voice seems to be the last straw in Apple's relationship with its developers. There are several reasons for their discontent. Firstly, building an app is not cheap at all. If developers cannot know the criteria that are being used in the acceptance process, they run the risk of developing an app that ends up being rejected and never makes it in the App Store. Secondly, the app discovery process is becoming increasingly tiresome. Except for the lucky few that get to see their app featured in an iPhone commercial, there is little a developer can do to make his app stand out in the App Store.

There is no doubt that developers are key to the App Store and Apple knows this. The fact that Phil Schiller himself (Apple Senior VP and the man that ran the latest WWDC in the absence of Steve Jobs) started sending emails out to angry developers shows just that. It is interesting to see whether Apple will be slightly more transparent about the acceptance process.

Personally, I do not think App Store will end up being suffocated by its own growth. There is however evidence that this outstanding success has taken even Apple by surprise and as such, they can be caught off guard at times. But I also think that the recent events show that Apple and App Store are not invincible and that they need to watch out when dealing with their two driving forces: the customers and the developers.