Finally, ShopSavvy Available on iPhone!
One of my son Alexander Muse’s companies, Big in Japan has finally been able to have their very successful application ShopSavvy available on iPhone. Here is the story from Alexander:
Before I get started, here is the download link: http://bit.ly/shopsavvyiphone. MG over at TechCrunch beat me to this post, but the story about how we got ShopSavvy on the iPhone is worth telling. First, the good news is that ShopSavvy is now available for the 2G, 3G and 3GS iPhone (of course we have been on Android for a year). We began building ShopSavvy for the iPhone last year and even submitted it to Apple for approval. After waiting four weeks without response we decided to make the application better. Our honest appraisal of the application was that it sucked. We worked on the app on and off until the summer when we decided to get busy. The big challenge? Scanning barcodes with the legacy non-auto focus camera seemed like an impossible challenge, but we thought we had a solution and began developing in earnest.
Just about the same time we finished our blurry barcode scanning solution (we called it Meatloaf), Apple announced the 3GS with an auto focus camera. This was a problem for Meatloaf as it was designed to scan a blurry barcode, not a clear barcode. We spent the next few months making it work with both, but the ‘fix’ meant that it wasn’t perfect - scanning takes a little practice with our current solution. Soon we figured out how to make it work on both VERY quickly, but it required a couple of additional weeks of development time. The decision was made to release our current solution and update it in two weeks (this was two week ago). Our updated release should be out in a couple of weeks.
Our beta testers (thank you guys for all your feedback) spent a lot of time trying to help us understand that our scanning process was a bit too complicated. If you know what you are doing (i.e. you are one of the developers) it is very easy to get a scan to work almost every-time, but if you do not work at Big in Japan it can be a challenge to get ShopSavvy to work. We took this to heart and have built some hints into the system. These ‘hints’ combined with the updated scanning technology should make ShopSavvy work on the iPhone better than it does on Android. Of course last week we thought that it might not matter.
On Friday we received notice from Apple that they had rejected ShopSavvy. We reached out to Philip Schiller and and Phillip Shoemaker and plead our case. Apple spent the weekend considering our plea and early this morning decided to approve ShopSavvy. ShopSavvy was made available this morning in the App Market. You hear lots of stories about developers who are ’sick’ of Apple and their iTunes policies, but at the end of the day we have had nothing but positive experiences. On behalf of the ShopSavvy team I wanted to thank all of the MANY people at Apple who have helped us.
Oh and before you call us and ask, “Can we license your barcode scanning technology” the answer is YES. We offer a free license if you agree to allow Big in Japan to publish your application. Here are the details.
