In the wake of Apple’s sudden decision to remove nearly all “sexy” applications from the App Store, we’ve been hearing that the company is also clamping down on so-called “cookie-cutter” applications — iPhone apps that are built from templates using one of the many app-building services available. This would be yet another major change for the App Store, as it already features thousands of such applications. And, perhaps more important, quite a few companies have sprung up to facilitate building iPhone applications. I’ve reached out to Apple to ask if they’d like to clarify their stance, but given their lack of transparency in the past, I’m not betting on getting anything definitive. To try to get to the bottom of the current situation, I spoke with multiple developers (some of whom wished to remain anonymous) to find out what Apple was telling them.

Between the developers I spoke to, the consensus was this: Apple doesn’t appear to be opposed to ‘app generators’ and templates per se, but in the last month or so it has started cracking down on basic applications that are little more than RSS feeds or glorified business cards. In short, Apple doesn’t want people using native applications for things that a basic web app could accomplish. For some of these services that’s bad news, because that’s exactly the sort of application they produce; any new applications they submit are going to get rejected. But all hope isn’t lost for them, provided they can make their apps more useful.

Unlike the ’sexy’ app ban that took place a few weeks ago, when Apple gave developers no options to keep their apps on the store, over the last month the company has been reaching out to at least a few app building services to suggest what they should be doing.

The founders of Appmakr

, which has been used by publications like The Atlantic

to build iPhone applications, say that the process has been quite positive (though they are quick to clarify that applications built with their tools are more full-featured than the basic RSS apps described above). After some suggestions from Apple, the service is integrating new features like in-app purchases, instant notifications, offline access, and landscape viewing modes to their app templates. Another developer mentioned that they might include a tip calculator for restaurant apps. Appmakr’s hope (and one that I’m sure is shared by other developers) is that applications generated using their tools will eventually be given an accelerated path through the App Store’s approval process, because Apple is familiar and happy with the kind of apps they produce.

However, from what I’ve gathered not everyone is having as much luck as the Appmakr team. Multiple developers mentioned that they’d heard of some app vendors that Apple wasn’t being nearly as accommodating towards — I suspect services offering the most basic templates are getting hit hardest. That said, the developers I spoke to said that they’d only heard about Apple blocking newly submitted applications, and that there wasn’t an indication that Apple is going back and removing all of the overly-basic apps they can find.

So why is Apple doing this? Here’s what Medialets

CEO Eric Litman had to say, which I think perfectly summarizes the situation.

This is the ongoing balance point between encouraging innovation and growth on one side and wanting to tightly control user experience on the other. Apple wants iPhone apps to be superior to Web experiences because they are extremely sticky and drive people specifically to buy the iPhone over competing smartphone platforms. Apps that are too simple or largely indistinguishable from the Web, other apps or particularly other apps on other platforms send the message to end users that the iPhone app ecosystem might not be particularly special.

Now the challenge for Apple is that the app building platforms are extremely attractive to a wide swath of the market that would otherwise be reluctant to bear the cost and complexity of developing an app from scratch. We have already seen apps from personal bloggers up to major media brands using some of these platforms, and many of the folks in that spectrum have content Apple would certainly want in the App Store. Interestingly, some of those same developers also have fully custom-built apps in the App Store, too.

So what are the platforms to do about the recent crackdown from Apple? There’s really only one choice if they want to continue to exist on the iPhone: invest in building out considerably more flexibility into their platforms to allow each app to differ from the others they build. Integrate more features and take the time to nail the design and UI elements to be representative of what Apple wants to see in every app.

For better or worse, Apple will be looking more closely at apps from the platforms than from individual developers. AppLoop, the first startup to announce and iPhone-specific app builder, is already gone. Others will almost certainly follow.

Overall, this will almost certainly result in a better experience for users as they have to deal with fewer spammy apps. But, as I wrote when Apple launched its war on sex apps last month, the policy change may also scare developers. After effectively sending a message to developers that basic applications were okay, Apple is again changing its mind.  Some developers may be hesitant to build their businesses around the iPhone, knowing that at any moment Apple could change its mind and cut off their only mode of distribution.

Thanks to Robert Strojan

for the tip
Photo by Goosmurf

CrunchBase Information

App Store

Information provided by CrunchBase

Libraries:

1. Three20

Three20 is a collection of iPhone UI classes, like a photo viewer, and general utilities, like an HTTP disk cache. Here is the list of components available in Three20

Photo Viewer

TTPhotoViewController emulates Apple’s Photos app with all of its flick ‘n pinch delight. You can supply your own “photo sources”, which works similiarly to the data sources used by UITableView. Unlike Apple’s Photos app, it isn’t limited to photos stored locally. Your photos can be loaded from the network, and long lists of photos can be loaded incrementally.

Message composer

TTMessageController emulates the message composer in Apple’s Mail app. You can customize it to send any kind of message you want. Include your own set of message fields, or use the standard “To:” and “Subject:”. Recipient names can be autocompleted from a data source that you provide.

Web image views

TTImageView makes it as easy to display an image as it is in HTML. Just supply the URL of the image, and TTImageView loads it and displays it efficiently. TTImageView also works with the HTTP cache described below to avoid hitting the network when possible.

Internet-aware table view controllers

TTTableViewController and TTTableViewDataSource help you to build tables which load their content from the Internet. Rather than just assuming you have all the data ready to go, like UITableView does by default, TTTableViewController lets you communicate when your data is loading, and when there is an error or nothing to display. It also helps you to add a “More” button to load the next page of data, and optionally supports reloading the data by shaking the device.

Better text fields

TTTextEditor is a UITextView which can grow in height automatically as you type. I use this for entering messages in Facebook Chat, and it behaves similarly to the editor in Apple’s SMS app.

TTPickerTextField is a type-ahead UITextField. As you type it searches a data source, and it adds bubbles into the flow of text when you choose a type-ahead option. I use this in TTMessageController for selecting the names of message recipients.

HTTP disk cache

TTURLRequest is a replacement for NSURLRequest which supports a disk cache (NSURLRequest can only cache in RAM). It has some other nice features too. HTTP posts are as easy as supplying a dictionary of parameters. The TTURL loading system can also be suspended and resumed at any time, which is a great performance helper. Network threads often fight with the UI thread, so you can suspend the network any time your app is momentarily graphically intensive.

URL-based Navigation

TTNavigationCenter is for those grizzled old web developers like myself who want to organize their app by “pages” which can be displayed by visiting a URL.

Your view controllers can simply register URL patterns that they handle, and when those URLs are visited the controllers will be created and displayed. You can also register generic actions that are called when a URL is visited.

TTNavigationCenter also persists and restores the full path of navigation controllers and modal view controllers, so your users can quite the app and come back exactly where they left off.

More details on:
http://github.com/facebook/three20

2. MajicRank 1.3

Here is a list of the features that this version, 1.3 adds:

* Adds historical graphs
* Stores all archives by AppID
* Reduces file size of stored archives
* Allows entering AppID with search preference over name
* Auto detects and fills in app ID when app name is entered
* Allows re-ordering of apps list
* Fixed a bug where deleting an app while editing it’s title caused a hang
* About box allows resizing, should now be viewable on low-res displays
* Adds latest date run to status text when update is complete

More details on:
http://148apps.biz/majicrank-13-released-adds-historical-graph/

3. Facebook connect Library for iPhone

* Seamlessly connect their Facebook account and information with your iPhone app
* Connect and share experiences with friends who also use your iPhone app
* Share user information and actions on your iPhone app with friends on Facebook

Details:
http://developers.facebook.com/connect.php?tab=iphonehttp://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Facebook_Connect_for_iPhone
http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Facebook_Connect_for_iPhone

4. MGTwitterEngine ‚ Twitter from Cocoa

MGTwitterEngine is an Objective-C class which lets you integrate Twitter support into your Cocoa application, by making use of the Twitter API. The entire API is covered, and appropriate data is returned as simple native Cocoa objects (NSArrays, NSDictionarys, NSStrings, NSDates and so on), for very easy integration into your own application.

More details on:
http://mattgemmell.com/2008/02/22/mgtwitterengine-twitter-from-cocoa

5. Route Me

A slippy map library for the iPhone.

Fast! Completely written in objective-c using CoreAnimation. Runs like the built-in app.

More Details on:
http://code.google.com/p/route-me/

6. Core Plot

Core Plot is a plotting framework for Mac OS X and iPhone OS. It provides 2D visualization of data, and is tightly integrated with Apple technologies like Core Animation, Core Data, and Cocoa Bindings.

More details on:
http://code.google.com/p/core-plot/

7. RegexKitLite

This document introduces RegexKitLite for Mac OS X. RegexKitLite enables easy access to regular expressions by providing a number of additions to the standard Foundation NSString class. RegexKitLite acts as a bridge between the NSString class and the regular expression engine in the International Components for Unicode, or ICU, dynamic shared library that is shipped with Mac OS X.

* Uses the regular expression engine from the ICU library which is shipped with Mac OS X.
* Automatically caches compiled regular expressions.
* Uses direct access to a strings UTF-16 buffer if it is available.
* Caches the UTF-16 conversion that is required by the ICU library when direct access to a strings UTF-16 buffer is unavailable.
* Small size makes it ideal for use in iPhone applications.
* Multithreading safe.
* 64-bit support.
* Custom DTrace probe points.
* Support for Mac OS X 10.5 Garbage Collection.
* Uses Core Foundation for greater speed.
* Very easy to use, all functionality is provided by a category extension to the NSString class.
* Consists of two files, a header and the Objective-C source.
* Xcode 3 integrated documentation available.
* Distributed under the terms of the BSD License.

More details on:
http://regexkit.sourceforge.net/RegexKitLite/

8. CHDataStructures.framework

is an open-source library of standard data structures which can be used in any Objective-C program, for educational purposes or as a foundation for other data structures to build on. Data structures in this framework adopt Objective-C protocols that define the functionality of and API for interacting with any implementation thereof, regardless of its internals.

Apple’s extensive and flexible Cocoa frameworks include several collections classes that are highly optimized and amenable to many situations. However, sometimes an honest-to-goodness stack, queue, linked list, tree, etc. can greatly improve the clarity and comprehensibility of code. This framework provides Objective-C implementations of common data structures which are currently beyond the purview of Cocoa.

The abstract data type protocols include:

* CHDeque
* CHHeap
* CHLinkedList
* CHQueue
* CHSearchTree
* CHSortedSet
* CHStack

The concrete subclasses of NSMutableDictionary include:

* CHLockableDictionary
* CHOrderedDictionary
* CHSortedDictionary

The concrete subclasses of NSMutableSet include:

* CHLockableSet
* CHOrderedSet

The concrete subclasses of CHLockableObject (which don’t have a protocol) include:

* CHMultiDictionary

More Details on:
http://dysart.cs.byu.edu/CHDataStructures/

9.ResKit

A library for testing resolution-independent iPhone OS applications.

ResKit simulates varying device screen sizes by resizing and moving your application’s main window. It supports scaling down the simulated device so more of the screen can be seen at once.

Details:http://github.com/jtbandes/reskit/

10.Sintaxi/PhoneGap

PhoneGap is a development tool that allows web developers to take advantage of the core features in the iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and Symbian with a unified JavaScript API

API

Device

Exposes properties of the phone, such as its device ID, model, and OS version number.

Location

Gain access to the Latitude / Longitude of the device, and depending on the type of device, the course, speed, and altitude.

Accelerometer

Monitor the accelerometer on the device to detect orientation, shaking and other similar actions.

Contacts

Query the phone addressbook to read the users contacts.

Orientation

Read the device layout orientation, e.g. landscape vs portrait.

Camera

Brings up the camera or photo browser on the phone to allow the user to upload a photo.

Vibrate

Triggers the vibration alert on the phone, if it is supported.

Sound

Play sound files (WAV, MP3, etc).

Telephony

Trigger and activate phone calls.

Details:http://github.com/sintaxi/phonegap/

11.Askit Framework
ASKit is an easy to use library for your iPhone applications. ASKit provides AppStore styled table views

ASKit Overview

• ASTableViewController: Instead of subclassing UITableViewController, you’ll subclass ASTableViewController. This is where most of the work is done.
• ASTableViewCell: This replaces UITableViewCell
• ASHeaderView: Provides the gradient header that you can find when viewing a single app in AppStore
• ASFooterView: This is the footer that AppStore shows your iTunes account in.
• ASInfoCell This extends ASTableViewCell and should be used for various information messages such as “No Items” and “Loading” (it also contains an activity indicator for loading messages
• ASSectionHeaderView: This is for table sections, you must return a view when using ASKit and not a string, otherwise it you won’t have the correct theme.
• ASTableViewCellLabel: Use this instead of UILabel while adding to an ASTableViewCell so the shadows are handled correctly when a cell is selected

Details:http://github.com/enormego/askit/

12.ElementParser

ElementParser is lightweight Cocoa Framework (usable on the iPhone) to provide easy access to XML and HTML content.

Details:http://github.com/Objective3/ElementParser/

13.InAppSettingsKit

This iPhone framework allows settings to be in-app in addition to being in the Settings app

Details:http://github.com/futuretap/InAppSettingsKit/

14.Accelerometer-Helper

Accelerometer utilities for iPhone, including trigger sensitivity and time lockout between events

Details:http://github.com/ars/accelerometer-helper/

Hope it helps few, if not all of the aspiring iPhone developers.
The list will be updated as and when we encounter a new useful Open source library!
So keep Track.
Any addition to the list is Welcome!!

This article is credited to mobisoftinfotech.com