Friday, September 11, 2009

Streaming on 3G - Bad Reviews

I just wanted to quickly comment about some recent 1 or 2 star reviews regarding the slow framerate on 3G networks. As a reminder, I have designed this application to work around restrictions placed on me by Apple. The application has been rejected for sale in the past because it exceeded "reasonable" bandwidth use on 3G and Edge networks.

I spent 1 hour on the phone with an Apple Engineer this summer to find out how to work around this and apparently there's no way to do so. During tests, Apple will run the app for 5 minutes and then see how much bandwidth was consumed. If it exceeds 5 megabytes in 5 minutes the app is rejected. On Wifi they don't care but on cell networks they are trying to limit usage.

So please, I encourage you to write reviews based on the features and the content, not on the restrictions that are in place by someone other than the developer.

Thanks,
Barry