Culture

Joe Hewitt Quits Facebook iPhone App Project Over Apple Tyranny

by Truemorist | November 12, 2009 at 12:26 pm

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Joe Hewitt, Facebook's iPhone app developer, is quitting the Facebook iPhone app project, citing Apple's tyrannical oversight policies. This is a pretty big deal, since Joe Hewitt was a one-man dev army who put together what became the number-one iPhone app of all time: Facebook for iPhone. The Brangelina of geekdom. The Speidi of mobile technology. The Reese Witherspoon/Jake Gyllenhaal of social media. You get the idea. Does this mean that it will now be the Keith Urban/Nicole Kidman of smartphone tools?

Joe Hewitt, whose Parakey was acquired by Facebook in 2007, is geek royalty, having also helped create Firefox.

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.”