Brent has an excellent post up about his experience developing NetNewsWire for the iPhone and he manages to say what I tried to yesterday before I got caught up listing my frustrations with Mobile NetNewsWire:

I’ve always worked in public or semi-public: release, listen to feedback, release, listen, repeat forever. I worked this way for years UserLand. All of NetNewsWire was developed this way, beginning with the very earliest betas of NetNewsWire Lite back in 2002.

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Which is why I’m more than a little bit at sea with the iPhone development experience. Getting beta testers is a technical and legal challenge. And I’m used to having hundreds, not just a few. Discussing development and design issues with other developers is usually a valuable thing, but there’s an NDA in the way.

That’s basically what I meant to say. The iPhone development model, the secrecy and the timelines imposed by Apple have effectively prevented any of the developers from creating a truly great iPhone app. To create truly great apps you need user feedback. Apple itself has enough people internally that can try the iPhone and give that feedback, but the smaller developers can’t get that feedback without releasing publically.

Sadly, in my last post I only managed to get one sentence that actually reflected this, despite the fact that it was intended to be my main message:

Sadly, the launch of the app store for me demonstrated just how much effort Apple put in to polishing their applications and getting them right and just how important it is to get real user feedback during development.