Now they’ve killed Scheme/Gambit-C and likely MonoTouch.

PhoneGap and its ilk are safe (for now), but this emblematic of Apple’s approach to third-party app development. It’s the price you pay for playing in someone else’s sandbox.

It’s a tidy sandbox, with rounded, rubberized edges and a bucket from FAO Schwarz. But it’s also sitting on the beach. When the industry grows up, it will end up there, embracing the open standards of the web over the passing benefits of a technocratic, on-deck distribution platform.

There’s a few things you can do to alleviate these pains:

1. Create an .IPA file instead of sending a (zipped) app. The process has been described at several places, e.g., How to automatically build an IPA file from XCode.

2. Learn about versioning and avgtool. This prevent you (and users) from having to remove the application before being able to update. Tutorial here.

3. Use a form for users to submit UDID’s (so they won’t send you screenshots and you can check validity). Make sure to stress that they can actually copy the number to the clipboard in iTunes, that’s really bad UI design on Apple’s part.

4. Provide your users with a simple applescript/bash/batch/python/ruby/whatever script that copies the crashlogs to their desktop for easy emailing

5. (Shameless plug) Something I think is really annoying is going through all the steps at the developer portal to add new beta testers, I created a script to do all the steps with one command from the command line.

We have a big group of beta testers. Most of them are capable enough to make a screenshot of their UDID, but don’t read instructions very well. Still, they all managed to install and update our app.

It wasn’t immediately accessible, but I tracked down one of their iPhone games, CookieCombo. Try it out if you found their advice helpful.

Edit: There’s a great post on the RedFin development blog on a related topic, installing beta builds on an iPhone.

Click here to launch iTunes and check out the application.

Thanks to all those that have made this possible and has helped take it this far, including inZania and Aleksey Gureiev!