From stepcase.com

For those who attended or saw the news coming out of Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference 2009 last week, you have no doubt learned iPhone OS 3.0 will be available on June 17. You’ve seen how the new OS 3.0 is packed with great features, but with these great features, comes bad news for developers and more importantly, users.

Last month, we did exactly that, updated to support OS 3.0 but was rejected on different occasions. We have exchanged emails but have yet to hear back anything solid from Apple.

Since being rejected, we have heard from at least few other developers of photography apps having the same issue with Apple. All this could have a huge impact not on us developers, but the iPhone users, since there’s a chance that these apps will be removed from the iTunes store, as described in this article.

Unlike Darkroom, there are other developers, of apps like NightCamera, QuadCam, ToyCamera, to name a few, lucky to have their apps approved before what appears to be Apple’s stricter control of their custom camera view in their API. This is what we assume from Apple’s email. Sure, iPhone users can continue to download and use those photography apps even after June 17. However, we predict those apps might eventually lose its popularity because even though they support the OS 3.0 now, these apps will have difficulty with publishing new features. Apple will reject them because they use the custom camera view just like Darkroom.

In other words, we suspect all these photography apps that uses a custom camera interface will experience a slow death.

To give an idea of the numbers, there has been over 700,000 users who have downloaded Darkroom and that excludes those who downloaded Darkroom Premium. Other photo app developers are affected too, one being QuickShot (from a comment on previous post), they too should have solid download figures with both their Lite and Paid version as their Lite version is included in iTunes Top 20 Free Apps (as of this post). Based on our numbers and some guesstimates, the total number of users and paying customers affected could approach a few million. If those popular apps mentioned above do slowly fall to the bottom, the number of users affected could easily double or triple.

Is Apple going to abandon all these users? And is it fair for Apple to force users to give up an app they have purchased?

www.stepcase.com