As promised, here’s some of what we learned about the app approval process from Google and Apple’s letters to the FCC. There’s nothing ground-shaking, but a few details of interest to smartphone obsessives. Apple: Apple says a staff member tests every submission for technical issues like bugs and unauthorized protocols. More holistically, they look for […]

If this story is true, I think it’s a real misjudgment on Apple’s part. Floatopian, a Virginia and Palo Alto-based developer, created an app called iSinglePayer designed to advocate for single-payer healthcare in the US. Per Floatopian’s open letter, the free app contained charts and information about health care reform; it could also calculate the […]

—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer Fascinating: Steven Peterson, a web developer in San Francisco, put together a handy iPhone app called Routesy that gives schedules and arrival times for Muni, the city’s public transit system. The underlying data is collected by a company called NextBus, which puts trackers on the various vehicles. Generativity at its best—the government […]

—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer Marcus Watkins, over at VersatileMonkey.com, has a writeup of what it was like to develop his first BlackBerry app. (BlackBerry came out with its own app store earlier this year, but it’s been strangely reticent about advertising it. BlackBerry users have long been able to get third-party apps from individual developers’ websites […]

—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer It’s been a while since we’ve done a roundup of what’s going on in the iPhone app world. Apple continues to reject or kill apps at a slow but steady pace. The rejections fall into a various categories: political rejections, content-based rejections (both explicable and not), and catch-all rejections of cool and useful […]

I’m starting to get a better sense of what Google’s open mobile OS, Android, will look like in practice. Google has just pulled tethering apps from the Market, the on-phone equivalent of Apple’s App Store. Tethering apps allow users to use their mobile phone as a sort of modem/internet connection for their laptop, and carriers […]

–by Elisabeth Oppenheimer The iPhone App Store is selling e-books, and (surprise!) has upset authors and developers by rejecting books with “objectionable content.” As usual, we don’t really know how the App Store rejection process works. But they seem to be searching books for the f-word and rejecting those that use it. Author Moriah Jovan […]

Almost since the introduction of the iPhone, there have been complaints that it doesn’t support Flash. Those complaints have picked up steam in the last week week, as Adobe demonstrated polished versions of Flash on other mobile platforms—including Android—and all but publicly begged to be allowed onto the iPhone. Flash, an Adobe product, is software […]

Apple continues to exercise its control over the iPhone platform, recently rejecting an app for using too much bandwidth. CastCatcher was a radio streaming app, which had been approved in several previous versions; the latest update was rejected for violating the TOS provision limiting bandwidth use. The developers are upset—they say the updated version didn’t […]

A few weeks ago, Google and T-Mobile rolled out the G1, the first mobile phone to run the open-source Android operating system. As the Android platform and Android Marketplace develop, it will be interesting to see how they compare to the iPhone platform and the App Store. Will the openness provide the benefits the Open […]