Crazy thing happened yesterday.

I had a new voicemail on my iPhone from a phone number that I didn’t recognize. I load it up, press the speaker button, and listen.

“Hi, this is Steve from Apple, calling from California. We wanted to talk to you about one of your apps, so if you could call us back, that would be great.”

It sounds just like Jobs.

I listen to it again. And again. And again.

After about five listens, I determine that it’s probably not Jobs, but it sounds pretty similar to him. And his name is Steve. And he works for Apple.

So I call back. It turns out that one of my apps in the review queue, Gold (iMobilepedia), had an issue. They had called me because it was listed for the price of $99, and not 99 cents, and they wanted to know if this was a mistake.

Whoops.

I also had to double check, so I asked him “So uh… this isn’t Steve Jobs is it?” This was met with an outburst of laughter, and the confirmation that it was not Steve Jobs.

Well come on. You get a call out of the blue, from Steve, from Apple, in California, and it sounds pretty similar to Jobs!

Ah well.

I learned something very valuable from this call, as well as some previous experiences with the store. App name, App Description, and App Price all factor into the App Store review process. They don’t just review the actual binary, they review the whole package.

My Fix-a-Pixel app got rejected no less than 4 times, from them claiming that diagnostic tools were not allowed on the App Store. From previous posts, you’d know that there already ARE similar apps on the App Store, but I won’t get into that again. So I just renamed it to “Crazy Psychedelic Disco Squares!”, and changed the description to remove any pixel-fixing text. No change to the binary. Accepted.

I wish I knew if they reviewed and approved each change to App Name and App Description after the binary has been submitted. When you change either of these, it only takes a few hours to show up in iTunes. I had been assuming that they don’t review these at all, but I’m not really sure.

iMobilepedia is doing well. Single iMobilepedia apps are outselling Collage on a daily basis, which is discouraging.

I’m going to add a few more features to Collage (like a unique take on Bookmarks), and then put out a Lite version. Then I’ll shop it around, and send some promo codes around. I don’t want to do it yet, because its not feature complete. Version 1.0 and all.

On the App Store, pride and success seem to be mutually exclusive.

The Wall Street Journal put up a great article today, talking about why crappy apps exist on the App Store. The answer is obvious: it’s because they sell. They sell well. Really well.

They interview an iPhone developer in the video, and he says “All of the crappy apps that I’m embarrassed about sell the most, but the good apps that I’m proud of don’t do as well.” This is the current overarching theme of the App Store. Quantity is overwhelmingly more successful than quality. Novelty rules over creativity. People want something that they can download, use once, laugh, and delete.

That’s kind of depressing.

As a developer, you want to create a product that you’re proud of. You want to tell all of your friends and family to go out and buy it. You want to show it off on job interviews. You want people all over the internet to blog about it, write about it on forums, and create YouTube videos about it.

Ideally, you would also want to make large sums of money off of it.

Time is a very valuable thing. When you give your time to iPhone development, you’re taking it away from something or somebody else. In order for that to be “worth it”, there needs to be a good return on the investment. You find yourself in a balancing act between the amount of time invested, and the money that it earns. The motivation quickly shifts from “making the best product possible”, to “making the best selling product possible, given the amount of time invested.”

Welcome to the Dark Side.