Apple Offers More Insight (Sort Of) Into App Store Approvals

RSS

According to TechCrunch and a few other sources that said they saw copies of a note Apple e-mailed to its registered developers, Apple on Tuesday night notified iPhone developers that the Developer News tool was available as an RSS feed and is publicly available for online reader tools and aggregators. The feed is available here.

It's a small gesture on Apple's part, but it's also the latest in a series of moves by Apple to head off mounting criticism that its wildly popular App Store is out of control and its app review and approval policies are inconsistent.

The latest move by Apple to clean up its App Store came Tuesday, as Apple from the App Store. The expulsion was reportedly the first time Apple has eliminated a large number of applications at once from a single developer.

The explosive growth of Apple's App Store -- IDC predicts Apple will reach 300,000 available apps by the end of 2010 -- has also brought plenty of backlash. Apple's methods for accepting and rejecting apps are consistently scrutinized and Apple faces further criticism that the App Store's mushrooming growth will eventually leave the App Store as an unorganized mess, if it isn't that already.

As rivals like Google ready their app strategies for 2010 -- the same IDC growth report clocked Google Android application growth at five fold within the next year -- they're ready to seize upon any shred of data or rumor that Apple isn't listening to the needs of its development community.

If that's the case, Apple's being a little more open with developers -- even if it's just an RSS-seeded version of a newsletter -- certainly can't hurt.