Thank you for expressing interest in the iPhone Developer Program. We have received your enrollment request. As this time, the iPhone Developer Program is available to a limited number of developers and we plan to expand during the beta period. We will contact you again regarding your enrollment status at the appropriate time.

Thank you for applying.

Best regards,

iPhone Developer Program

This makes me worried. Apple is not telling me whether or not I’m in the running to get selected. Also, they’re teasing me with this “free” SDK which allows me to waste time writing this app which may or may not be allowed to be on Apple’s iPhone store in June.

It’s discouraging. Yes, I completely understand that Apple’s overwhelmed with requests, but there should be some deciding factors in the selection:

Apple developer status Apple should give priority to those who are in, or were in the Apple developer program. At minimum, this costs $500 a year.

Past development work If you’ve written apps in the past, or in my case, since 1989, and Apple has recognized you as they did with several of my apps, they should let those people in first.

My biggest concern is not being able to get my app ready the day the iPhone app store is opened. As everyone knows, the internet is full of good ideas, and even though the first person to do something isn’t necessarily the best out there, it does give a serious advantage to that developer.

Apple is not communicating to the people that signed up if in fact they’ll be able to get their apps on the store in June, and that deflates my enthusiasm for the project.

Am I worrying about nothing? We won’t know until June, but in the meantime, I wish Apple would be more forthcoming about how they’re making selections.

EDIT: Soon after I wrote this post, I found this article on arstechnica.com:

Apple to iPhone App Store applicants: Just hang tight

This sentence sums up exactly what I conveyed in this post:

“Still, a letter like this complicates the decision to begin or continue developing an iPhone application.”

The $99 entry fee doesn’t bother me. I understand why Apple’s charging that much for it. You need a digital signature so that malicious code can be traced back to the owner, and technical support from Apple was never free. Also, Apple will be hosting the app for you.

The problems come with what the SDK is incapable of doing. You can’t interface with the dock connector, you can’t record audio, and you can’t record video. This is a serious detriment to what I wanted to develop, and I’m sure there are many people working on social networking apps such as seesmic and qik that are pretty ticked off about this as well. If you wanted to post audio to utterz, you have to use the dial-in method, but you still can’t post video. There’s also no GSM on the iPhone which makes geotagging impossible.

One other issue that bothers me is that when the phone rings, your app has to quit right then and there. Now, what if I don’t want to answer the phone? Granted, I don’t expect the iPhone to be running mission critical apps, but the user should decide if they want to answer the phone or not.

There’s one last issue that’s been gnawing at me. I signed up to be an iPhone developer a week ago. I have this app that I’ve been writing for Mac OS X using Cocoa which will port very easily to the iPhone. However, I haven’t heard back from Apple yet. Now, let’s say you’re an independent developer and want to write some freeware apps for the phone. You get all excited to write for it, you hunker down and start coding like a madman, and what if Apple thumbs their nose at you and says “sorry, you haven’t been selected”? So far, I don’t know anyone that’s been selected, but I’ll bet there are a lot of people out there that are expecting to be. This would be a serious slap in the face to the developer community and really needs to be addressed very soon. Apple needs to start sending out developer approvals 10 minutes ago.

Still, I feel bad for the developers that Apple refuses to make the iPhone more social media capable. Maybe iPhone 2.0 with 3G will be what we always wanted, but in the meantime, I’ll have to use my Nokia N95 for social media.

As for the iPhone vs. the N95, that’s a different post.