Joe Hewitt Gives Up On The Facebook iPhone App Because Of Apple’s Review Process

Joe Hewitt was the main developer of the Facebook iPhone application, but he recently decided to give up on that project. A couple of days ago, he wrote “Time for me to try something new. I’ve handed the Facebook iPhone app off to another engineer, and I’m onto a new project,” tweeted Hewitt. The main reason why he decided to give up on the App Store is because of Apple’s policies.

In an e-mail to TechCrunch, Hewitt said that he is philosophically opposed to the existence of the App Store review process and believes that they are setting a bad precedent for other software platforms. He said that he would rather be known for making the best platform available rather than being seen as a developer that has to go through a middleman in order to showcase software.

Joe Hewitt is best known for his contributions to the development of the Firefox web browser. In 2000-2003, Hewitt did a lot of the UI programming for the Netscape browser as well. Personally I applaud Hewitt’s contributions to the Facebook iPhone App and the Firefox browser. I hate to see him leaving the App Store developer community, but I’m not surprised he left because Apple’s review process has been highly criticized since the beginning.

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