From TC:
Developers are claiming that there are massive delays in payments for as early as last fall and are not being paid the amount of money that the developers are in fact due from sales. One developer, who hasn’t been paid since November 2008, forwarded us an email chain between Apple’s App Store finance team and himself. An Apple employee, who was responding to the developers complaints, wrote that the developer’s continued emails about the late payments was “bordering on harassment…”
iPhone App Developers Threaten To Sue Apple Over Late Payments [Techcrunch via Cult of Mac]
This is a very real and serious problem. I’m one of the many iPhone developers who has yet to be paid a dime. Apple hasn’t responded to any of my inquiries pleading for resolution over the past month.
I spent thousands of dollars building an app. People continue to buy my app on The App Store and Apple gets paid – meanwhile my bills continue to accumulate. I have kids to feed, a car/house, etc to pay for.
I’m posting as “Anonymous” to avoid backlash from Apple.
Well, c’mon, you don’t build up the sort of cash reserves that Apple has by giving money away, do you?
Man, this company sure loves it when people have to line up to get anything from ‘em.
I wonder what would happen if these developers were to pull their apps from the store.
Damn, Strider wins the internets again.
Some things about publishing don’t change, it seems.
Krawk!
I think PHISROW’s comment above makes sense. Apple is probably holding on to the money for financial reasons. It helps fluff up the shareholders report.
Also, I wouldn’t be surprised if all that cash was temporarily stuffed somewhere, gathering interest.
LOL Captcha text..
latest sinister
35,000 apps, and there are going to be some glitches. It’s inevitable. Having run a similar (but microscopically smaller) system for the last year or so, I can tell you that there are dozens of things that can go wrong or delay payment without malice on anyone’s part.
Of course, you don’t hear anything from the developers who are perfectly happy and having no problems. That’s how it goes.
Of course, if you’re the unlucky bastard whose account has floated into the Sargasso of screw-ups, you would be furious and it would seem that the entire system was a malicious trap designed to STEAL YOUR MONEY. Understandably. However, this doesn’t necessarily accurately reflect the situation as a whole.
Apple’s in an interesting position, because they need to keep overhead down by leveraging a relatively small workforce of actual humans with a bunch of automated tools. The tools probably aren’t perfect though (they never are).
This is precisely the same problem they are having with the app approval process: too many apps, too few people reviewing them. Of course, when the process encounters an edge case, like the baby shaking app or whatever, that’s where the system breaks down. Any system that relies on a human to make a judgment call will not have a 100% accuracy rate. Get the smartest, most empathetic person on the planet to make 35,000 judgment calls, and some will get blown. It’s just human nature.
It sucks, but there’s no reason to blow it out of proportion.
Oh, and the headline is a little unfair. It makes it sound like no developers are getting paid, and they’re all loaded up with torches and pitchforks because of it. A more accurate but less sensational headline would be:
“Some iPhone App developers are complaining of late payments and threatening to sue”
A small difference, perhaps, but a real one.
@MKULTRA,
Do you know for a fact that at least a technical majority of developers are getting paid? If so, I agree with you.
If not, I wouldn’t be so sure they are not deliberately screwing people. And “collecting interest” is an odd comment, what with the economy in the toilet and the near-certainty that the developer doesn’t get that interest when he finally does get paid!
Sorry bout all the uber-negatives — my brain seems to be working backwards today
My guess is that now that the app store is a success Apple would like to ditch most of the small early adopters and move instead to getting bigger name developers working on the store.
They can’t just refuse to pay and they don’t want to just refuse to release apps but the easiest way to get rid of the small scale “trash app” developers and at the same time remove a lot of the joke / novelty apps from the store giving it a much more professional appearance and appealing to the big names is to just delay payment to the little guys forcing them to go find work elsewhere and souring them to the experience of developing for the store.