“Pocket Walsh” Highlights the Problems of Closed Application Store

Sometimes you wonder if there is any justice in the world. Certainly developers who’ve spent countless hours on iPhone applications and struggled to market them will be looking at iFart (with 30,000 sales at 99 cents per sale) and wondering why they bothered.

And then there’s a sneaking suspicion that leisure applications like iFart will cause the App Store to start being more picky in the applications that are allowed onto the store. Which probably means that niche applications that cater to a handful of people will get nowhere.

That means the likelihood of Pocket Walsh, reported on today by Mike Butcher at Techcrunch UK, will not see the light of day. Now that is a shame:

“Pocket Walsh” is an iPhone app developed by Firebox co-founder Tom Boardman with one use only: to randomly select the Twitters of another entrepreneur, Paul Walsh, who heads up Segala and is working on a mobile startup Wubud.

Because it’s the ease of making these “mash-up” fun applications that makes developing and working on a platform one of the great joys of coding – and there are precious few joys as it is. But to finish coding, submit it to a Standards and practices committee, and then waiting weeks for the results takes a certain amount of fun out of it.

As Walsh would say (FX:scrambles to the Twitter API)… The freezer broke down and all its contents have defrosted. FFS, when are things going to resume to normal #.