On Tuesday night, the creators of iOS smash Tiny Tower launched a damning attack against Facebook and smartphone gaming titans Zynga. Along with a sarcastic thank-you letter, the Tiny Tower makers posted images of their game alongside those of Zynga’s newest iOS title, Dream Heights. The images appeared to show Zynga’s game copying Tiny Tower’s basic gameplay elements — elevators, types of in-game offices, the way residents worked, and even how in-game purchases worked.
Thanks to rampant Twitter and Reddit reposting, the image caught fire and sparked online debates over mobile gaming “clones.” But when American App Store shoppers tried to find Zynga’s new game and compare for themselves, they were out of luck. It had never gone live there.
How, then, did the Tiny Tower team find and play Zynga’s new game in the first place? As it turns out, Zynga turned to a resource that has become the worst-kept secret of American iOS developers: the Canadian App Store.
The iOS site TouchArcade reported that Dream Heights launched exclusively in Canada, meaning that users could only grab the game with a Canadian iTunes account, and Zynga’s not the only one to go that route. App makers now rely on launching across the border as both a testing hub and a way to overcome the App Store’s lengthy quality-assurance process.
“It’s common knowledge that having a ‘perfect’ game at launch has become important on the App Store,” said David Edery, CTO of game maker Spry Fox. He’s in a position to know, having launched Triple Town for iOS last week.
Spry Fox fixed most of the bugs within hours, then sent an updated build to Apple. That’s when the wait began. Apple reviews every app update to check for bugs and rule-breakers, and considering the deluge of daily submissions, an official estimated wait of three-seven days may seem reasonable.
But apps with unfixed bugs can rack up nasty reviews quickly, and free-to-play apps are as easy to delete as they are to install. Even three days can knock a small-fry app out of the sales charts.
Rather than hope for Apple to lighten its policy, many developers now debut their almost-finished apps in a single country before an American or international launch “so that they have time to catch every major bug that may have eluded them,” Edery said, or sometimes to test experimental ideas. Canada provides the perfect testing bed, developers said, because its audience is smaller than America’s yet doesn’t need a different language.
To its credit, Apple offers an “Expedited App Review Process” form on its site for buggy conundrums, but developers don’t depend on it. Asher Vollmer, co-creator of iOS sensation Puzzlejuice, “wasted a day and a half waiting for Apple” after submitting a game-fixing patch before discovering the special form, even though he’s been an iOS developer for over a year. “I was uninformed and totally unaware,” he said. Apple processed the second request within hours, but Vollmer admits his shot might have been for naught if Puzzlejuice hadn’t hit the App Store’s top 10 charts.
Zynga must assume so, too, because Dream Heights is not the company’s first game to debut on the Canadian App Store. Zynga reps would not confirm which other games had done so, though, and declined comment to any other questions about Canadian releases or the Dream Heights controversy.
Thanks to rampant Twitter and Reddit reposting, the image caught fire and sparked online debates over mobile gaming “clones.” But when American App Store shoppers tried to find Zynga’s new game and compare for themselves, they were out of luck. It had never gone live there.
How, then, did the Tiny Tower team find and play Zynga’s new game in the first place? As it turns out, Zynga turned to a resource that has become the worst-kept secret of American iOS developers: the Canadian App Store.
The iOS site TouchArcade reported that Dream Heights launched exclusively in Canada, meaning that users could only grab the game with a Canadian iTunes account, and Zynga’s not the only one to go that route. App makers now rely on launching across the border as both a testing hub and a way to overcome the App Store’s lengthy quality-assurance process.
“It’s common knowledge that having a ‘perfect’ game at launch has become important on the App Store,” said David Edery, CTO of game maker Spry Fox. He’s in a position to know, having launched Triple Town for iOS last week.
Spry Fox fixed most of the bugs within hours, then sent an updated build to Apple. That’s when the wait began. Apple reviews every app update to check for bugs and rule-breakers, and considering the deluge of daily submissions, an official estimated wait of three-seven days may seem reasonable.
But apps with unfixed bugs can rack up nasty reviews quickly, and free-to-play apps are as easy to delete as they are to install. Even three days can knock a small-fry app out of the sales charts.
Rather than hope for Apple to lighten its policy, many developers now debut their almost-finished apps in a single country before an American or international launch “so that they have time to catch every major bug that may have eluded them,” Edery said, or sometimes to test experimental ideas. Canada provides the perfect testing bed, developers said, because its audience is smaller than America’s yet doesn’t need a different language.
To its credit, Apple offers an “Expedited App Review Process” form on its site for buggy conundrums, but developers don’t depend on it. Asher Vollmer, co-creator of iOS sensation Puzzlejuice, “wasted a day and a half waiting for Apple” after submitting a game-fixing patch before discovering the special form, even though he’s been an iOS developer for over a year. “I was uninformed and totally unaware,” he said. Apple processed the second request within hours, but Vollmer admits his shot might have been for naught if Puzzlejuice hadn’t hit the App Store’s top 10 charts.
Zynga must assume so, too, because Dream Heights is not the company’s first game to debut on the Canadian App Store. Zynga reps would not confirm which other games had done so, though, and declined comment to any other questions about Canadian releases or the Dream Heights controversy.
