App Store breaks 100,000 mark

Apps from the App Store.Today Apple announced that the App Store has breached the 100,000 mark. That’s right, more than 100,000 apps are available for your iPhone or iPod Touch. A solid 50% of those apps are strictly for replicating flatulence and then auto-tuning it to your favorite T-Pain beat.

In all seriousness, it’s another great milestone, and another great reason to reorganize the whole damn thing. This is probably the last time you’ll hear an app count out of me until the 500,000, at which point the numbers won’t even matter because of the hellacious mess the App Store will be in. It’s not that I can find something when I’m explicitly looking for it, but that it’s difficult to get the new and unmentioned stuff, the apps that don’t make the blog circuit. Those are the things I still want access to. Appoftheday made a decent start, but app organization needs more than just a community vote.

  

Facebook App Still Isn’t Approved

Facebook 3.0 still delayed.Apple’s been hard at work trying to remedy the disease that is the App Store review process. It’s lengthy, arbitrary, and creates more drama for the company than other issue. But Phil Schiller can only be in so many places at once, and try as it might, Apple is still letting apps fall through the cracks. Big apps. Highly anticipated apps. Facebook 3.0 apps.

We’ve been hearing about the new Facebook app for months, and it really does sound awesome. It adds a lot of features I won’t re-reprint here. But the app is stuck in review limbo, awaiting the whimsical approval of the 40-man review team, and even the developers are starting to speak out.

Facebook 3.0 developer Joe Hewitt has been the man primarily responsible for keeping the public up to date on the app’s progress. You really have to applaud the guy for making his submission public because it puts a lot of pressure on Apple (a move Real copied this week). Hewitt’s gone public again, this time with a long list of level-headed complaints for the review team. My favorite goes like this:

Oh, but you say that iPhone apps are different, because they run native code and can do scary things that web pages can’t? Again, you’re wrong, because iPhone apps are sandboxed and have scarcely any more privileges than a web app. About the only scary thing they can do outside the sandbox is access your address book, but Apple can easily fix that by requiring they ask permission first, just like they must do to track your location.

Be sure to read the rest of the post. It could have been a lot of whining and moaning and “I’m smarter than all of Apple combined.” Instead, Hewitt put together a solid argument for the dissolution of the App Store review process.