Tristan O’Tierney | Mac Geek

For awhile this was a post I didn’t want to write out of fear. Fear because of people like Craig Hockenberry who’ve received nasty-grams from Apple for crossing the *******NDA line. Fear from my experience at working at Apple, and knowing what speaking out against them can do for you in the long run. However, I feel ethics are my foundation. If I don’t stand up for what I believe in, how can I respect myself?

My position on the AppStore rejections was simple: What Apple’s doing isn’t the greatest, but like almost always don’t attribute to malice what is more likely explained by ignorance. Apple is a hectic place, I know, I’ve worked there. More often than not, your favorite missing feature or most annoying bug is not some ulterior motive to kill babies and kick puppies. They probably just didn’t get the time. So, when I saw what was going on with these rejections I figured the reason was simple: The perfect policy hadn’t been put in place yet. Not because Apple’s “Evil” but because they just hadn’t formally established criteria for inclusion into the store well enough yet.

That was until rejection letters became NDA. To call this action anything less than the exact opposite of a benevolent response would be an understatement. This is at the point that I expect a response from the Steve himself relatively shortly on all the bad publicity it’s generating. Now mind you, I’m not writing this as an attack on a company I hate, but out of love for a company I feel so utterly passionate for that I can’t stand by and let it ruin the opportunity to change humanity forever over what I ultimately feel is just a lack of formal policy.

The simple truth is the current policy cannot stand, and we (third party devs) await a response as soon as possible. We know how hectic it can be there, but we can’t wait forever. To all my friends at Apple: we know you’re probably annoyed by all this nagging. We just want things to change for the better, and we think you agree too.

It’s unfortunate I don’t have the time to blog more regularly, call it workaholic syndrome if you will. This Monday was my last day at Tapulous, and I wish them the best of luck. I came to the company because I shared a similar passion with Mike Lee, that quality matters and that writing beautiful software really can change the world. In the end, Mike and Tapulous couldn’t see eye to eye and the leadership that Mike brought to this platform-specific company I feel is no longer there.

This leads me to what’s next: United Lemur. For the time being, I’m working on an amazing project (that also happens to be very secret) and I hope to tell you more about that when the time comes. Until then, look forward to Mike’s announcement on October 9th.