"The App Center will begin rolling out to people in the U.S. today"
What is up with Facebook and US-only products? Their Camera app is not available in most countries. Even their app for managing Pages isn't available in my app store (they still keep showing me the annoying message to download it). And it takes them literally order of magnitude of months (if ever) to get their products worldwide, like with Facebook check-ins.
its not just Facebook with us-only or us-first products. i believe it has to do with legal issues with other countries.........or good old beta testing
Has this always been the case? No, Apple gradually made all these countries available.
Terms of use have to be drafted and reviewed by lawyers for each country. This will take time. Why go through all that trouble and wait months if you can gain valuable insights by a quick launch in your most importanht market?
Facebook's apps on the app store do not make use of the option for a custom EULA, so nothing there needs translation. If they are already launching for the US store, what possible benefit could there be to withhold the app from the many (small) european app stores?
(And then proceed to put up huge banners in the other apps hassling users to download the new facebook camera and pages apps - even going so far as to provide a button that sends you an international SMS with a link that doesn't even work)
Also all submitted apps goes through scrutiny before getting published. To make sure they dont violate any top conflicting issues in your distribution store
You need to translate things for an international rollout which takes time. Plus US is a known devil and easier to rollout and look at numbers to fix the glitches.
Sure. But that shouldn't be a reason to not launch it in India, for example. I have never seen a non-english keyboard in my life here.
Very few countries have internationalization as a necessity. For most places, having the app in native language is a plus, but most people still frequently use the web in English.
I mean, Instagram could figure all the rollout challenges with a single digit amount of people. One would expect a post-IPO company to do so too.
What is up with Facebook and US-only products? Their Camera app is not available in most countries. Even their app for managing Pages isn't available in my app store (they still keep showing me the annoying message to download it). And it takes them literally order of magnitude of months (if ever) to get their products worldwide, like with Facebook check-ins.