Last week Apple featured BuzzVoice 3.0 under New and Noteworthy Apps on the iTunes App Store’s front page — a real treat for any app developer. This had a strong effect on app sales and it wasn’t long before BuzzVoice broken into the top charts under the App Store’s News section making it as high as number eight under the Top Paid Apps and number six under Top Grossing.

Very Cool!

A new set of apps is showing up under New and Noteworthy now (I’m told that Apple cycles the category every week). I hope they see the same good fortune as BuzzVoice.

At the end of June Apple sent a notification out to members of its developer program advising them that all new iPhone apps and updates would have to be built with the iPhone SDK 4. The important bit of the email read thus:

Make sure that your applications are compatible with iOS 4. All new applications and updates to existing applications must be built with iPhone SDK 4. In addition, the App Store will no longer support applications that target iOS 2.x.

This seems reasonable and, by itself, is not a problem as apps can still target previous versions of iOS even though they are built with iPhone SDK 4. The problem arises when you realize that any third party libraries your app uses will also have to be recompiled.

Several months ago Apple purchased QuattroWireless as their ad solution and recently relauched it as iAds. Most third party library publisher will be very quick to provide an updated version of their compiled library (if they don’t just provide the source code), and this is where I think Apple dropped the ball. This is not the case with QuattroWireless, at least at the time of this writing. The existing QuattroWireless library can not be used in apps built with SDK 4 without generating compile errors. The library needs to be republished for the updated SDK, however an email exchange with QuattroWireless reveals they have no plans to do this

As you may know, QuattroWireless was bought by Apple. As a result we are moving forward with our iOS 4.0 support in the new iAd platform. There will be no immediate update to the QuattroWireless SDK to support 4.0. We hope you join the iAd Network for 4.0 ads. Please let us know if you have any further questions

So why not just go with iAds? Including iAds in your app means you limit your audience to just people who have upgraded to iOS 4. Including iAds in your app means your app will not run on the iPad (the iPad has no iOS 4 support at this time). Basically implementing iAds means limiting your potential audience, at least for the time being.

I guess this means all the apps that currently use QuattroWireless and who are unwilling to lose audience by updating to SDK 4 will be looking to another ad solution such as AdMob.

Apple, what were you thinking?