Joe Hewitt quits working on the Facebook iPhone App

Joe Hewitt, the creator of Facebook's iPhone App (the most popular free app on the iPhone platform) has just quit the project (TechCrunch):

"Two years ago I jumped headfirst into the iPhone ecosystem, investing my entire career in Apple's devices, their operating system, and their SDK. After witnessing the way Apple treats its developer community, I no longer feel that 100% is the correct percentage of my career to have invested in their platform."

At reMail, we heavily use Joe's spinoff project, Three20. Three20 is essentially the "missing library" to iPhone development - it has all the sweet UI candy that a developer would want: Styled text, tabs, picture galleries, the good stuff.

While I'm sad to see Joe go, I don't think that iPhone is a bad platform to develop on. As a developer of a slightly less popular but very useful App, I understand Apple's need to maintain some control over the platform. Yes, the review process might take some time and can feel unfair. But:

1. The documentation is excellent
2. The support is excellent: I once received almost real-time email support from an Apple person about a minor debugging issue. There are forums where you can get support for your issues. If you found a problem, or have a feature request, you can file a bug
3. The tools are excellent: If you've ever played with Instruments (comes with Xcode), you'll know what I mean
4. Free developer events: I just attended one in San Jose and found it very useful, both for learning and networking
5. Review times are getting shorter: it used to take 3 weeks, and it's now more like 9 days

That being said, I do hope that Apple will eventually take some bold steps to cut review times further, or drop the review process entirely for something smarter. A better review process would benefit both users and developers.

More about this on TechCrunch here.