It’s been a long and confusing week for Kevin Duerr, thanks to Apple’s stubborn belief that it’s perfectly fine to conduct business as if you are high-level government officials from a particularly snarky banana republic.

Duerr and his team at Riverturn, a technology consulting firm that also builds iPhone apps, have spent the past five days trying to figure out the real reason why Apple pulled their VoiceCentral Google Voice app from the App Store and whether there is any hope that Apple will reconsider its decision.

“We knew from reading about other people’s experiences that developing for the iPhone is not always the easiest thing in the world. We had read plenty of the horror stories. But the thing that we hadn’t anticipated was this utter lack of communication,” says Duerr.

To make life even more interesting, Riverturn has also been bombarded with questions from people who bought VoiceCentral when it was available and now want to know if Riverturn will continue to support and upgrade the app, how they can get a refund, or whether the app will be magically deleted from their device the next time they sync.

Duerr says that he believes that “unless Apple goes really” overboard, those who have purchased the app can continue to use it for as long as they want -- just don’t delete it. But among the many things currently giving him grief is that Apple expects Riverturn to refund customers' money on request.

“Apple made it impossible for our customers to receive the fixes, updates, and support by pulling the app. We were fulfilling our end of the bargain. Why should those refunds come out of our pocket?” says Duerr. “The refund issue and lack of respect for our mutual customers has further soured us on the belief that Apple cares at all about their developers … other than the dollars they bring in.”

Riverturn, which develops apps to sell as well as apps for its customers to distribute, has now put all iPhone development on hold until they see how the situation pans out.  

“We are interested in both the Android and WebOS (Pre) platforms. But at this moment, we have not made any final decisions at all, other than that it would be really hard to continue to invest our own dollars in the iPhone development program for our own apps. We think that we will continue to develop apps for our clients but will strongly caution them that they too could lose their investment if Apple ever decides to pull their app.”

It’s still uncertain whether Apple or its iPhone partner AT&T is ultimately behind the decision to push all Google Voice apps off of the App Store’s virtual shelves. What is certain is that Apple has opted to handle the situation in its usual Voice-of-God fashion, rather than dealing with its app developers as equal partners.

iPhone app developers have long complained that Apple’s app rejection process is random and illogical, resulting in apps getting rejected or removed from the store on what sometimes seems like a whim.  

In Duerr’s case, it’s not hard to figure out what the problem is -- he stepped on some delicate corporate toes with VoiceCentral. Apple pulled all Google Voice applications from the App Store on July 27, claiming that the apps “duplicate features that come with the iPhone.” The glaringly obvious real issue here is that Google Voice offers free services that phone service providers rely on heavily to rake in big bucks such as SMS messaging, sophisticated call management features, pricey long-distance charges, and long-term contract lock-ins.  

Duerr found out that VoiceCentral had been removed from the App Store when a potential customer emailed customer support via the Riverturn website, saying they were unable to purchase the app. VoiceCentral was still present in the store, but any attempts to pay for it produced an iTunes error.

“We immediately went in to verify it and found the same thing,” said Duerr. “We were surprised, but then again every once in a while there are tech hiccups in the store, so we thought it might have just been a glitch. We figured it might just be fixed soon, but we continued to research the problem. Then we saw that a competitor posted on his blog about his app being removed, and real concern set in. This was definitely more than a glitch.”

Duerr and his team shot off frantic emails to the Apple Dev Support folks, the Apple app-review team, and “every address they you give you as the ‘proper channels’ for these kinds of questions." As the day wore on with no response, Duerr urged the team to squelch their panic and give Apple a little more time to respond.

On June 30, the team was finally contacted by Richard from Apple, a cordial person who was profoundly unable to provide specific, useful information to Duerr, details beyond the fact that “VoiceCentral has been removed from the App Store because it duplicates features of the iPhone … and was causing confusion in the user community.” When Duerr pointed out that other apps like Textfree, Skype, fring, and iCall also duplicated iPhone features, Richard said he couldn’t discuss other apps.

Richard also couldn’t say whether specific features could be removed to make VoiceCentral compliant or whether Riverturn should even bother to resubmit the app. He was able to offer one concrete bit of information -- there was no one else at Apple that Duerr could talk to about this, but Richard.

And Richard is certainly right about that. Five days later, Duerr says he hasn’t been able to pry any further information from Apple.

“We have learned zero from Apple. They will not respond to anything, and our only communication was that 'conversation' with Richard, if you can call that a conversation,” says Duerr.

“I look at this way: ‘My house my rules’ is a fair statement, but you should make those rules known and you should be consistent. Apple’s approach with its iPhone app developers is more along the lines of ‘Go ahead and try whatever you want and we’ll let you know when we don’t like it anymore, even if we once did.’ There’s no sense of fair play here.”

Duerr’s experience has inspired some strongly negative responses that echo his conviction that Apple isn’t behaving honorably or intelligently.

Anil Dash, Vice President at blog company Six Apart, pointed out in a post that all the mysterious silence may have been OK back when Apple was niche player, but secrecy just doesn’t scale well.

“… This squelching of communication about Apple's products results in customers being unhappy or uncertain of the future value of their purchases, (and) developers being too afraid to bet their livelihoods on a platform whose fundamental opportunities could be destroyed at any time … The sad truth is that Apple is still stuck in an anachronistic, 1984 mode of communicating with the world.”

Duerr says he’s an optimist and believes that the strong public response to this issue can encourage Apple to change the way it works with the development community.

“I’ve been of big supporter of Apple over the years, and I truly want to see them succeed. Doing the right thing by their extended developer network is going to be a key part in achieving that success. The App Store is a huge competitive advantage if it stays vibrant, but if Apple loses that... who knows?”