If you frequently use iTunes or even an Apple TV, you’re probably familiar with Apple’s free Remote app for the iPhone and iPod touch, which lets you control those devices. If you’re wondering why the App Store favorite hasn’t been updated in eight months, it turns out the reason is that it’s developed by one lone dude -- and he’s busy with another project for the company.
That’s the revelation this week from Posterous co-founder and CEO Sachin Agarwal, who took to his blog to ponder on Apple’s success, according to AppleInsider. Agarwal claims that a lot of that success can be attributed to how Cupertino assembles “small teams of highly qualified people to work on projects” -- including a good friend who is the lone wolf responsible for the free Remote app.
"Apple doesn't build large teams to work on every product they make," Agarwal wrote. "Instead, they hire very few, but very intelligent people who can work on different projects and move around as needed.
“One day you might be working on the Remote app, and the next day you might get pulled on to another project that needs your help,” the Posterous CEO explained.
That probably won’t come as much comfort to the many fans of the Remote app, which has languished idle since November, 2009 when the app was updated to squash bugs related to Apple TV 3.0 and iTunes 9. That means there has not been an update to bring universal compatibility for the iPad (although the app runs just fine on the tablet device), nor support for iOS 4, including multitasking and the retina display of the iPhone 4.
It seems that Apple shuffles engineers from both the Mac OS X and iOS teams as needed, with the priority placed on whatever is getting “pushed out the door in time for its scheduled release.” It’s no surprise that Apple CEO Steve Jobs himself referred to the company as “the biggest startup on the planet” during an interview earlier this summer.
"Great startups have small teams that can build quickly and pivot when needed," Agarwal concludes. "When working at a startup, you don't own just one part of the application; you have to be able to work on whatever needs your attention that day."
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MikeLawson
August 03, 2010 at 9:09am
Other than an iPad-specific version, what's to update? It works just fine as-is, doesn't it? It does for me.
bazaarsoft
August 03, 2010 at 9:07am
they want to wait to update until iOS 4 is available on the iPad.
As an iOS developer, the timing of the iPad and iOS 4.0 makes releasing a new version for each release is less than cost-effective, at least for free apps, when you've got other development priorities. We only released a minor update for the iPad because full screen usage is particularly useful in our app (not really so with Remote). Otherwise, we would have waited for iOS 4.x on the iPad and just done one big release with both screen size/orientation changes along with support for iOS 4 features. To do otherwise is a bit of a waste from a resource perspective.
