Boom.

Here it goes:

• First of all, remember that you can always create web apps. It’s worth mentioning that you can avoid the App Store and its quirks altogether; it’s up to you ;) This opens up the possibility of using your preferred server-side technology + JavaScript, and there’s quite a few libraries and tools that will help you create a killer web app: Joe Hewitt’s excellent iUI (yes, he’s the same guy behind the Three20 project), the Tank Engine Rails plugin Rails iUI plugin (Tank Engine does not work very well unfortunately), iPhoney or Eclipse are just some of the alternatives.
• If you like C++, you can choose between the official SDK (yes, you can create iPhone apps with just C or C++), or other alternatives like nui, POCO, Boost or haXe. And apparently, soon you’ll be able to use a Symbian C++ toolkit as well (and who knows, maybe even we’ll get Juce on the iPhone one day too!).
• If you are a Flash and ActionScript developer, you are most probably aware that you can create native iPhone applications using Adobe Flash CS5…
• For C# and .NET developers, there’s MonoTouch, which has received extensive press coverage lately.
• If you want to use Lua, you can use the Wax framework.
• If your idea is to “write once, run anywhere”, and “anywhere” in this context means Android, iPhone, BlackBerry and other mobile platforms, you might want to try rhomobile, Corona, PhoneGap or QuickConnect. The XMLVM project might also interest you, as it consists of a cross-compiler toolchain which can be used with Ruby, .NET, Java and can generate code for many platforms at once.
• Finally, if you are into game development, the quantity of libraries allowing you to create iPhone games is simply astounding, many supporting alternative programming languages: SDL, Unity, SIO2, Torque2D, cocos2d and Game Haxe.
• And of course, there’s the official SDK, with Objective-C and Cocoa Touch all the big buzz around it.

What do you think? Is there any library or programming language that I’ve forgotten in this list? Just leave the name and URL in the comments below.

Update, 2009-11-05: Just found the Swebapps service which allows you to create (very basic) iPhone apps without coding.

Update, 2009-11-24: Here’s a new entry for the growing list of alternative frameworks: Crystal SDK by Chillingo.

Update, 2009-11-25: Another one, in C++ and cross-platform: Airplay SDK.

During a chat session with Stefan Fürst from Media Atelier we put together a quick list of significant Mac applications created in Switzerland (and southern Germany), and indeed the list (in no particular order) is nothing short of impressive; check it out:

• Zattoo, a really great TV player (cross-platform, actually, but the Mac version works really well);
• Cornerstone, one of the best Subversion clients for the Mac OS X operating system (the other being Versions);
• TimeLog and GrandTotal, the two applications used by independent contractors (like me) to keep track of the time spent in projects, and then to generate invoices out of that data – and which I personally prefer and strongly recommend over Billings;
• Distribute by Seven Lakes Software, dubbed the best ERP software available in the Mac, with an impressive feature list and lots of positive reviews;
• Snowtape, an application I’ve become addicted to lately, which allows you not only to listen to internet radio stations… but also to record them as MP3 or AAC files, which are automatically imported into iTunes!
• Waveboard, a Google Wave client for Mac (and iPhone soon, too!);
• Mailplane, a native Gmail clients with awesome capabilities;
• Posterino, Proxymind and Snippet Mind from Zykloid;
• Background Music by infoAtelier, currently in a promising beta test phase;
• iBackup;
• GraphClick, iLocalize, ProVoc, XS and AudioXplorer by Arizona Software (even if they aren’t in Switzerland anymore I think, they are definitely worth including in this list);
• PowerMail and FoxTrot by CTM Development;
• LiquidCD by Maconnect
• Several Mac products by Stephan Burlot’s Coriolis Technologies;
• Don’t forget that most Cocoa apps are unit-tested with Sen:te‘s original OCUnit unit testing framework bundled with Xcode since 2005!
• And last but not least, the diverse suite of Logitech drivers and control panels written by Men in Silicium in Geneva!

It really looks like the Swiss enjoy writing Mac apps (I certainly do and will publish mine soon!). Have I forgotten anyone? Please don’t be upset, and feel free to leave your links in the comments below. I’d love to know who else is creating killer apps for the Mac in a radius of 300 km around Zürich!

Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with any of these companies (I’m just a friend of Stefan). And if you’re more into “enterprisey” stuff, here’s the “Swiss-Made Software” label site that you migth find more interesting ;)

Update, 2009-10-23: Some more applications added after the publication of this post:

• Luscious SMS, the SMS client for the Mac;
• Special mention for Cyberduck, an open source FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, Cloud Files & Amazon S3 Browser for Mac OS X, or “the poor man’s version of Transmit” :)

Update, 2009-10-24: Sophie Teuschler tells me not to forget the multiple Apple Design Award winners SubEthaEdit and BoinxTV by The Coding Monkeys, not far from Switzerland, in Bavaria…!

Update, 2009-10-25: I’ve just received an e-mail from Cyril Pavillard about his company Mnemis and their product Uniboard which looks absolutely awesome by any standards. Be sure to check out this cool Swiss project!

Update, 2009-11-12: Just found out about noidentity and their MoneyBook iPhone application. It seems that this application is just a copy from another one called “pennies”. Shame on you noidentity.

• Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference or WWDC, held every year in San Francisco, CA (USA), usually around June, and featuring presentations from Apple employees; if you’ve never been to one, believe me, you should;
• Voices That Matter iPhone Developer Conference to be held in Boston, MA (USA) next October 17th and 18th, with (among others) Erica Sadun, Aaron Hillegass, Stephen Kochan and Marcus Zarra;
• NSConference, to be held from January 31st to February 3rd next year near Reading (UK), and from February 21st to February 24th in the Georgia Tech Institute, GA (USA), featuring (among others) Matt Gemmell, Marcus Zarra and Aaron Hillegass;
• The 360|iDev conference that just finished in Denver, CO (USA), which featured (among many others) Bill Dudney, Brent Simmons, and Marcus Zarra (definitely, Marcus Zarra is everywhere!);
• The iPhone Developer Summit in Santa Clara, CA (USA) next November 3rd;
• The iGames Summit, a conference targeted to iPhone game developers, held last March in San Francisco, CA (USA), featuring (among many others) Neil Young (from ngmoco), Andrew Lacy (from Tapulous) and Mike Mettler (from AdMob);
• The Macoun Entwicklerkonferenz which happened last September 26th in Frankfurt (Germany);
• The iPhone developer conference in Köln (Germany), in December 1st and 2nd;
• And finally, the JAOO iPhone Dev Day in Zürich (Switzerland) next October 8th, featuring Raven Zachary, Alex Cone and… many others ;)

Also noteworthy, but not so much about software development I think, is the Mobile Enterprise Conference in Amsterdam (Netherlands) on November 3rd, which has a couple of tracks about the iPhone in enterprise.

Feel free to add links to other similar events elsewhere in the world!

Update, 2009-10-02: Here’s the link to Jonathan ‘Wolf’ Rentzsch’s C4 Independent Developers Conference.

Update, 2009-10-03: The Øredev 2009 Developer Conference in Malmö (Sweden) next November has iPhone / Mobile tracks too. And so will the Scandinavian Developer Conference 2010 in Göteborg (also in Sweden).

Several iPhone developers have publicly stated their opposition to the Google Voice fiasco (starting with Riverturn themselves, the developers of the application), and many have simply stopped creating iPhone OS applications altogether; just to name a few, Fraser Speirs, Steven Frank and Andrew Wulf have publicly stated that they don’t want to deal with the App Store process anymore. And I’m sure that there are many more developers evaluating this very possibility out there; when you have Om Malik or Michael Arrington bashing the iPhone, it sure creates a lot of buzz and uncertainty in the market.

However, and this is my official position, even if I do not agree with the current App Store policies, I’m not quitting the iPhone OS platform anytime soon. I’ll build more applications for the iPhone in the future – heck, I’ve got 2 already approved and 3 more on the approval process pipeline, with at least 3 more in the development phase. My plan, and what this article is about, is about managing the risk represented by Apple in this business. It might be hard, but it’s not impossible, no matter what others say. NOTE: I’m not a lawyer, so take this advice as it is, and check with your attorney before taking any important business decision. I will not take responsibility for any business or financial loss, application rejection or removal that will arise, directly or indirectly, for following these guidelines. Use this information at your own risk.

The advice in this article applies mostly to consulting firms and independent consultants; obviously, if you develop your own products, you are the only one to hold the responsibility (and the only one to reap the benefits). Nevertheless, in the case of consulting, or when developing custom iPhone applications, you should shield yourself from the risk represented by Apple – and yes, I mean and stress the use of the word “risk” here.

In concrete terms, whatever your application does, there is a certain (relative) risk of being rejected or removed from the App Store by Apple, with or without valid reasons, in almost a random fashion. Being pessimist from the very beginning leaves you with the possibility of having a nice surprise later! If you work in consulting contracts, you must know, evaluate, and take this risk into account while doing estimations and contract negociations; the basis of this reasoning is that if your clients’ applications have a certain degree of risk of being rejected, you must not be held liable in that case. Finally, you must do whatever you can to avoid your application from being rejected; this is your obligation, and the only means you have to increase your chances of selling your applications through the App Store.

iPhone software development is a highly risky activity: consistent project management practices, human resource management, prototyping, education, quality management, memory management, code organization, keeping an eye on compiler warnings, all these factors help reduce the risk of having your project enter the dreadful CHAOS statistics. However, Apple’s own politics regarding the App Store introduce a new level of risk into your project, unforeseen and, unfortunately, hard (but not impossible) to manage.

Explain the risks to the customer

Your customer must know about the App Store review process and all of its quirks. This is a reality. She might not need all the details, because more often than not, customers want an iPhone application just because “they have to be there”, without caring that much about the latest geek details about the App Store rejection policies. But they must at least know the following facts:

1. Depending on its features, an application might not be accepted in the App Store at all; some reasons for rejection are known, but the most important thing to know is that “Apple reserves the right, in its sole discretion, to reject an application for any reason“, including, but not limited to, the (bad) mood of the reviewer.
2. Moreover, even if it has been approved in the App Store, and even if it has been already sold to some customers, Apple reserves the right, in its sole discretion, to remove an application from the App Store at any time. Boom.

As incredible as they might sound, your customer must know these facts, and you must keep a written track stating that your client acknowledges these facts, before the project starts. It’s their risk, not yours; if once they acknowledge all of these factors, they still want their iPhone application, they will have to take care of this risk, and you shouldn’t be taken as responsible for any problem caused by Apple.

I can’t stress this enough: as always, keep a written track of the acknowledgement of these facts by the client, stating explicitly that you, as a developer, cannot be held responsible by arbitrary rejections not based in explicit facts. This means that if the rejection is due to non-respect of the UI guidelines, then yes, you must solve the problem as part of the warranty; but if the rejection is due to non-specified reasons, then it’s not your responsibility at all.

Reading a draft of this article, Stephan Burlot made an interesting comment about this particular point: if you go to your customer and tell him, just like that, “your app might never see the light of the App Store”, you can be pretty sure he’ll just run away, and hire another developer who will keep some of this truth away from his eyes, at least to get the contract. So the important thing here is to be professional and keep an eye on the most obvious factors that make Apple angry:

• Telephony services
• Porn and erotic content
• Exchange of music
• Access to the local music libraries of the device

Release dates cannot be guaranteed

Even if Apple acknowledges that 9 out of 10 applications are nowadays approved in about two weeks (the incubation time is apparently increasing), you can never be sure of the date when you will receive the nice “your app is ready for sale” e-mail.

Remember Schrödinger’s cat? Well, there’s a bit of randomness in the date in which your application will be approved (if that ever happens at all), which means that you must not commit to a defined application release date in your development contract. Hence, when submitting your app, select a date at least 1 or 1.5 months in the future, and begin your marketing efforts as soon as the application is “ready for sale” in iTunes Connect. You can change the release date once your application has been approved.

Reduce the chances for rejection

Closely follow Apple’s own iPhone Human Interface guidelines for your applications, use some common iPhone UI patterns, avoid known UI design mistakes, and finally check out the App Rejected and Application Submission Feedback sites, and use the information as checklists for your applications, in order to verify as much as possible before submitting them to the App Store. Make this a part of your quality management process, at the very end of the development cycle.

Apple also published some interesting tips last week, which can be considered as “official” guidelines, even if I think that the information in the App Rejected and App Submission Feedback sites is (at the time of this writing) incomparably better.

Conclusion

To summarize: I (like many others) still believe in this platform. And I believe Apple will slowly remove some of the cruft from all of the process and make it more transparent.

Moreover, the risk exists, that Apple’s review team stands between you and the App Store; but even so, this risk is highly relative and manageable: at the time of this writing, there are over 63’000 apps already approved, and in July 2009 alone, 7’600 applications have been approved! So chances are, many, many apps will still be approved, and yours has a large, large chance of getting into the party soon.

Interestingly, in June 2009, 9’887 apps have been approved, while 10’203 have been submitted; this means that only 3% of the applications submitted were rejected… that leaves a 97% of approved applications! Even more important: the rate of rejected apps seems to have a negative slope (both in absolute and relative figures)!

(Data derived from 148apps.biz: app submissions and total app count)

Hope this helps! As I said above, I am not a lawyer, so all of this information is based in my own experience, working as an iPhone development consultant for over a year now. Feel free to add your own experiences in the comments section below, so that all of us can benefit from it.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Stephan Burlot for reading and commenting drafts of this article!

Update, 2009-08-03: Don’t miss this brilliant MacWorld article about the current evolution of the issue.

Update, 2009-08-04: Just found some more tips to avoid application rejection (including a second part).

Update, 2009-11-28: A new site is tracking down application rejections: http://apprejections.com/ (apparently http://www.apprejected.com/ does not work anymore).

Thanks to Brett Terpstra (who interviewed me) and the TUAW guys for publishing the interview!

Yay! :)

Thankfully I am not the only one who thinks that the interminable series of demos is just a waste of our time, when all we want is to see new stuff in the SDK. We’re developers, not marketing people.

That flight, by the way, could have been dubbed the “WWDC Express”, as the number of guys (and gals!) typing code on Xcode was waaaaaay above the average. I had the opportunity to chat with Markus Palmanto from Finland and he showed me his amazing Accordio application! Check it out on the App Store. One of the best music instruments I’ve seen so far on the iPhone – from a great musician, too!

I won’t go through all the fuss and rumors about the next version of the iPhone… but indeed, I’m sure that we’re ready for big surprises tomorrow; for the moment, I know that tonight I’ll be attending sfMacIndie, and tomorrow evening the iPhone Intelligence party; I hope to meet many of you this week!