One of the most important lessons I learned during my startup adventures so far is, creating a business/product relying on third parties is one of the most dangerous choices. Here is what sucks.

Developing iPhone apps

All apps submitted to the App Store go through an evaluation process. Sometimes it takes 2 days and sometimes 15 days. You can’t estimate what could possibly happen because the process is not transparent. Even updates go through the full evaluation process. You have a critical bug in your iPhone app and you changed only one line and submitted an update, now you have to wait about a week to get it fixed.

True story, a complete one or two weeks to submit an update for an app in year 2012. This is what happened to us, a small but critical bug delayed our app launch 7 days. Thankfully it is on App Store now. I am not sure if that expensive company accounts have some privileges or not.

Developing Facebook apps

Facebook API is crap. You must have balls if you are building a serious business on top of the Facebook Platform. And by the balls, I mean you should have serious contacts at Facebook or you should be a part of Facebook partnership program.

One reason is Facebook platform is full of serious bugs that could possibly block your development. Even I found several of them. [1][2][3][4] and waited a long time to get them fixed. Can you imagine a bug that affects Login with Facebook that will cause 50% decrease in your sales/signups? It is quite possible and as you might expect Facebook wouldn’t care, why would it?

Another reason is about Open Graph. We are heavily using Open Graph protocol to publish user activities on Facebook timeline in a fashioned way. However Open Graph actions do have an approval process which is not transparent. Some of our actions got approved in 1 or 2 days, however we have a “buying” action that is stuck at Approval Pending state (not rejected or approved) for months even we resubmitted it several times. It is just annoying.

Our use of “listen” action is another story. As you may know, only chosen partners (Grooveshark, earbits, Spotify etc.) – yeah, those who have balls are allowed to use this action. In our case, we don’t stream any music in our service but we only publish that our user is now listening to that song. We applied Facebook with a detailed explanation then they responded with a questionnaire form full of DMCA, copyrights and other crap that we have nothing to do with. We explained our situation again and as you might expect they could not get it. We are still posting “listen” action as traditional wall post and hopefully it will change in a few god damn months.

Don’t rely on others if you have an option to not to.