Facebook developer Joe Hewitt, the man behind the immensely popular Facebook application for iPhone, has just tweeted that he’s done with the project:
“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.”
Joe says his decision to quit the project is based entirely on Apple’s tyrannical App Store approval policies:
“My decision to stop iPhone development has had everything to do with Apple’s policies. I respect their right to manage their platform however they want, however I am philosophically opposed to the existence of their review process. I am very concerned that they are setting a horrible precedent for other software platforms, and soon gatekeepers will start infesting the lives of every software developer.”
“The web is still unrestricted and free, and so I am returning to my roots as a web developer. In the long term, I would like to be able to say that I helped to make the web the best mobile platform available, rather than being part of the transition to a world where every developer must go through a middleman to get their software in the hands of users.”
Joe Hewitt’s move is a big deal, because he has essentially been the one-man show behind the iPhone’s most popular application of all time. Hewitt has been quite vocal about his opposition to Apple’s ridiculous App Store approval policies — in a post last August, he wrote that “the review process needs to be eliminated completely.” And to be clear, Hewitt is still at Facebook, though he can’t talk about the next project he’s working on.
This is a sad day for Facebook on the iPhone.
Joe Hewitt is a software engineer at Facebook, which he joined when the company he co-founded with Blake Ross, Parakey, was acquired in July, 2007. Before that, they created the Firefox browser.
Source: Tech Crunch
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