Apple released iPhone 2.2 Software Update last week, which delivers several anticipated features, most notably, Google Street View, public-transportation information and walking directions. There’s also a slew of application enhancements and welcomed bug fixes to improve reliability. While progress is good, we’ve found the new update to be both positive and problematic, especially for the development community.

One of the key features that we’re particularly pleased with is the enhancement of Google Maps with the addition of Google Street views, public transit and walking directions, dropped pin address display and the ability to share location via email. A more robust integrated mapping system means additional value for developers who include links to it. Applications such as our upcoming GPS, GasBuddy and Overnight are centered around the mapping functionality and thus serendipitously benefit from these improvements.

Apple has made a number of changes to the App Store.  Some of the applauded features include the ability to review directly from the phone and to see multiple screen captures. New listing displays each application from top paid rather than most recent, boosting apps that continue to perform.  This however, can be misleading because, although the default is still top paid when viewing a category detail, it is based on download quantity rather than gross revenue – in essence rewarding low cost .99 cent apps over more feature-rich solutions (similar to iTunes).  Apple also rewards free applications by showing top downloads per category. Note that almost all top downloads per category are free. While we welcome many of the improvements to the App Store, the top icon per category is unfortunately skewed towards the development of freeware.

Application developers were also disconcerted to realize that the integrated email location and remote podcast updating takes up functionality that other developers were previously selling or attempting to sell. This leaves concern for other features Apple may want to ‘assume.’ Are they producing an integrated recorder, or GPS tracker? How does one know what solution to solve that will not be relevant enough for Apple to stay away.

But for developers one of the biggest issues is how updates can “break” an application with no warning. It’s a huge challenge to get a high-feature app to be stable on the iPhone. In fact, we don’t just have to make our app stable, we have to guard against instabilities in other apps and the iPhone itself (a little known secret is that many apps crash not because they are unstable, but because an app running before them had a memory leak).

This is not an easy job. But it’s one we signed up for. In the 2.2 update, changes in Core Audio rendered one of our applications, Voxie, useless. We weren’t the only victim. We don’t have a total count, but several hundred other apps “broke” on this last iPhone update for various reasons. We can’t comment on how other developers handled this, but we had to work day and night for 2 days to fix everything, then our update sat in the review queue for 5 days before our customers got it.

We couldn’t help receiving negative reviews and poor public perception. And the review stick with you and are painful to an app. Furthermore, we have no way to contact those reviewers to tell them the problem has long since been fixed. But that’s a subject for a different blog post.

In the end we do think these things can be avoided if future updates had a companion process that developers could rely on to test their apps before Apple pulls the trigger. This would help developers as much as it would the users of our apps.

[tags]iphone application, iphone developers, Apple[/tags]