Interview: Brent Simmons on IPhone Software and the Trouble With the App Store

Wired: Gadget Lab: The iPhone launch suffered many problems, from the activation issues through availability to a buggy OS. One thing that at least seemed to run smoothly was the launch of the App Store, the place to find all the software that can run on the v2.0 iPhones and iPod Touch, and Apple shifted a staggering ten million applications in the first weekend.
But on the other side of the store, where developers toil to bring us those applications, things were a little different. Apple’s insistance on secrecy meant that developers were cut off from their air supply: a large and vocal group of beta testers. Worse still, Apple’s vetting process (which doesn’t seem to be doing much for the quality of titles in the store) means that each and every update has to be hand checked. Frasier Speirs, author of the iPhone Flickr client Exposure, has first hand experience: “I submitted Exposure 1.0.1 to the App Store last Friday and, five days later, [it] is “In Review”.
Similarly, NetNewsWire Developer Brent Simmons has pushed out five updates of his free iPhone newsreader application since launch, fixing most of the problems I noted in my review. None of them has yet shown up in iTunes. We asked Brent about the App Store, developing for the iPhone and the future of jailbreaking.
Gadget Lab: What’s been the hardest part about developing for the iPhone. The platform itself, or the super-secret approach of Apple?
Brent Simmons: The platform is wonderful. It’s like what we’re already used to — Cocoa on Macs — but smaller and more streamlined, and, well, tons of fun to work on.
The secrecy makes it difficult. For Mac programming, there are all kinds of resources — mailing lists, bits of code posted on the web, wikis, other developers — to…