Is Apple killing off photo apps with a custom camera UI?
Tuesday, June 16, 2009 at 1:30PM | Glyn Evans 
This is a direct copy of a blog post by Stepcase the developers of Darkroom and Darkroom Premium, and ties nicely in with my last post about some photo apps not working with OS 3.0.
Stepcase's Darkroom and Darkroom Premium are just 2 of many apps that will not work under 3.0 and the fixes to make them work are being rejected by Apple, so as before ONLY UPGRADE IF YOUR APPS ARE CERTIFIED WITH 3.0.
"We wanted to update everyone on the status of both Darkroom and Darkroom Premium. For those who attended or saw the news coming out of Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference 2009 last week, you have no doubt learned iPhone OS 3.0 will be available on June 17. You’ve seen how the new OS 3.0 is packed with great features, but with these great features, comes bad news for developers and more importantly, users.
Last month, we did exactly that, updated to support OS 3.0 but was rejected on different occasions. We have exchanged emails but have yet to hear back anything solid from Apple.
Since being rejected, we have heard from at least few other developers of photography apps having the same issue with Apple. All this could have a huge impact not on us developers, but the iPhone users, since there’s a chance that these apps will be removed from the iTunes store, as described in this article.
Unlike Darkroom, there are other developers, of apps like NightCamera, QuadCam, ToyCamera, to name a few, lucky to have their apps approved before what appears to be Apple’s stricter control of their custom camera view in their API. This is what we assume from Apple’s email. Sure, iPhone users can continue to download and use those photography apps even after June 17. However, we predict those apps might eventually lose its popularity because even though they support the OS 3.0 now, these apps will have difficulty with publishing new features. Apple will reject them because they use the custom camera view just like Darkroom. In other words, we suspect all these photography apps that uses a custom camera interface will experience a slow death.
To give an idea of the numbers, there has been over 700,000 users who have downloaded Darkroom and that excludes those who downloaded Darkroom Premium. Other photo app developers are affected too, one being QuickShot (from a comment on previous post), they too should have solid download figures with both their Lite and Paid version as their Lite version is included in iTunes Top 20 Free Apps (as of this post). Based on our numbers and some guesstimates, the total number of users and paying customers affected could approach a few million. If those popular apps mentioned above do slowly fall to the bottom, the number of users affected could easily double or triple.
Is Apple going to abandon all these users? And is it fair for Apple to force users to give up an app they have purchased?"
Like these developers, I too would like to know if Apple are going to abandon users of photo apps that use these unapproved API's? Also what about all the money spent by consumers on apps that Apple approved and now won't approve, who's liable?
Please leave comments and feedback on this issue below.
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Reader Comments (3)
Glyn,
Thankfully, FotoTimer runs on 3.0 without issues (whew!). I would encourage other iPhone photo app developers to file bugs if they have not already asking for APIs to access the camera features. FotoTimer does not use any undocumented APIs, so hopefully I'm insulated from odd behavior with future OS udpates.
I suspect that camera/picture taking APIs have just taken a back seat to more system-wide features like copy/paste. Nobody can say for sure, except Apple, but my guess is that an official API for the camera is on the way in a future iPhone OS update.
Cheers,
- j e f f
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jeffrey.w.lynch
MacAboutTown
Well with almost 1000 (YES one thousand) iPhone apps on my iPhone & almost every photography app available do I own.... I am going to do this which I think others should do as well. I will be contacting apple with a list of all my apps Paid & Free (excluding Betas) & give Apple a choice. They will either have 30 days to approve ALL the apps I have purchased that have yet to be approved for use with 3.0 OR they have 30 days to REFUND me every last cent that I paid them for apps they are denying approval after forcing developers to update yet will not approve them due to ridiculous reasons.
So I personally will be forcing apple to Approve & or Refund me all that money.
I will be contacting apple soon & will also be enforcing & sticking my ground on this issue.
If all of us do the same thing they will be VERY annoyed to have to pay us all back & secondly & hopefully take a look at their own ridiculous App approval program & fire a few idiots who reject apps for the stupidest of reasons.
I will not be accepting a NO on this issue & therefore I will get $$$ or my apps... It is one or the other!
SCW
Just wanted to clarify that we've only used their published API (UIControl's API) to achieve certain Darkroom's functionalities. They've been approving all previous versions up until now, but we're not sure why Apple claims that we use an undocumented API.
More details can be found in our earlier blog post.
We think certain photo apps, those that uses custom camera interfaces (meaning not using the default camera shutter closing action screen) are affected. Like Darkroom, we noticed QuadCamera is another photo app that's still waiting for their approval on the eve of OS 3.0 launch.