Announcing: The Unofficial iPhone SDK Feedback Project
By 
A couple of days ago, I received a note from James DonFrancesco about an unexpected behavior change introduced in iPhone 3.0:
In 2.X, apps could launch a tel:// url to dial the phone without user input. In 3.0, Apple introduced a verification box to obtain user permission when an tries to make an outbound call.
This change breaks James’ baby monitor app — which makes calls parents when their kids wake — and diminishes the user experience of the whole genre of specialty dialer apps.
James, reasonably, wanted to gather a posse of similarly effected people to to collectively lobby Apple for a change; perhaps convince them to borrow from the Core Location user experience and let users grant apps permission to dial without validation.
James’ situation is a specific example of a larger pattern to address: there isn’t an acceptable way for iPhone developers to constructively provide feedback with gravity.
Sure, Apple takes bug reports. However, the system is effectively opaque. Is the submitter alone with his/her issue, or does it effect a silent majority of developers? Furthermore, while bugs are objectively resolvable, they’re a subset of the much larger category of subjective feedback, e.g., policy/behavior changes.
There is evidence that Apple responds to constructive feedback: They dropped the NDA, they’ve reversed app rejections (e.g., Eucalyptus), and there are reports that they actively try to avoid bad blood.
So, to provide the iPhone developer community with a mechanism to collectively submit constructive feedback with gravity to Apple, I’m pleased to announce:
The Unofficial iPhone SDK Feedback Project
The fine folks at UserVoice have provided us with a system for collecting feedback:
Anyone may submit feedback; the community then votes on the issues, producing a stack-ranking of the most important items on the minds of iPhone developers.
Developers can also enlist their app’s users to vote for more gravity.
The system functions as an economy: you have a limited number of votes, forcing you to make spending choices, concentrating feedback. With enough participation, the system will function as an efficient market, accurately indicating what’s on our collective minds.
Of course, without your participation this is for naught. Contrary to conventional wisdom, you can beat city hall — I personally, literally beat city hall in a fight this month. Apple can be moved too.
For further motivation: I’ll be running a new, regular feature here on Mobile Orchard highlighting new/hot/interesting feedback activity. So go make your voices heard!
The dial-out issue is a very big deal for our company (the makers of Baby Alert Pro, described in the post).
All baby monitor / security monitor / quick dialer apps are broken or at the very least inconvenienced by this ridiculous change in behavior.
There is no workaround, so we had to take the app down from the App Store.
Getting feedback from Apple is like pulling teeth, so I look forward to this SDK feedback project helping us and similar companies out.
“The system functions as an economy: you have a limited number of votes, forcing you to make spending choices, concentrating feedback. With enough participation, the system will function as an efficient market, accurately indicating what’s on our collective minds.”
We should be able to apply some of our votes as a “negative” vote. i.e. if we really don’t think a suggestion it viable etc.
Many thousand of my customers can not use the Apps they have paid for anymore. This is a terrible move from Apple… At least they should allow it if the user wants to…
Not gonig to change anything, you are not familiar with Apple at all if you think otherwise.
Brilliant idea, Dan. Will be interesting to see if anything comes of it! You can count on our support.
Michael, I tend to think that negative voting gets abused. I like systems like Stack Overflow where it’s reserved for people who’ve built up a significant amount of karma, but otherwise I prefer systems without.
I like this idea. Unfortunately it doesn’t address things that are specific to *your* app that are felt by almost nobody else because they don’t use that feature. Other developers probably won’t vote for your issue, so you’re still not heard.
The issues that get a lot of votes are probably issues Apple is going to fix anyway. An example: I had a deal breaker issue with the Movieplayer framework. If you stop a movie and play it again, it started at the frame you stopped at and then rewinded, leaving an ugly flash. I worked around it by covering things up with an overlay. But recently, after more than 6 months, I got an email from Apple saying the bug was fixed in 3.0. (On the bug reporting page there was no indication beforehand that even somebody had looked at it or confirmed i, but that’s a whole other issue.)
Nobody would have voted for that bug, still it made my app much more complicated and has cost me many extra hours.
mare: I disagree with your reasoning. Apple fixes bugs; that’s not the issue. This is not so tactical. Much of it is subjective. There are policies, approaches and other things above the bits-level that’s at issue. Have a look at the feedback left in the 12 hours since I announced this project for examples.
I noticed that this is called the Unofficial iPhone “SDK Feedback” project. But what about the App Store itself and issues related that are not to do with the SDK / API?
I’m wondering if I should submit my issue that was documented here https://blog.smallmedium.com/?p=88
Jordan: yes, I think you should submit it. I tried to pick a compact label that would cover most eventualities, but the problem with being concise is that its, well, not expansive enough! 🙂
Done. Thanks for doing this Dan.
Thanks to everyone at Mobile Orchard.
tel://8582323033?confirm=NO
This is what you should request. Don’t act like this change is completely ridiculous. As developer of a auto-dialing app I prefer Apple’s new mechanism.
This is a great little idea you posted about and which I will follow up with. I posted a blog entry on this exact thing and explained the issue, as well as with stackoverflow.com and other sites and have had some interesting feedback. Here is the article and links.
In my entry I also ask developers to file an “enhancement” bug directly with Apple’s bug tracker… To which you will receive an email stating that this is “closed” due to a duplicate ticket – then the number. I found the ticket on OpenRadar and it was well worded and precise as to the issue we developers and our users are now facing.
Good luck fighting the good fight!
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