Tapulous is an iPhone development company best known for applications like Tap Tap Revenge, Friend Book and the Twitter client Twinkle. After a seemingly smooth launch and opening months, things have just been shaken up at Tapulous, not for the better.
The iPhone dev company launched right before Apple’s WWDC ‘08. It seemed like good timing and the company looked poised for a strong future. “Things are changing pretty quickly for Tapulous, however, and not exactly for the better. According to a blog post by Mike Lee, “irreconcilable differences” within the company has led the board to request his resignation only a couple of months after things got started,” ars technica reports.
Jacquei Cheng from ars technica.com found Lee and asked him a few more questions about what happened at Tapulous. “The Engineering and Design team had concerns about the direction the company was heading,” he told Ars. “As the founder and leader of that team, it was my job to press those concerns. That put me at loggerheads to the other partners, and the board sided with them.”
In a rather bleake translation: The people in charge of Tapulous’ financial success are more concerned with inflated pockets than the actual quality of their products.
Of course this is not a new scenario. Once a digital startup takes on venture capital funding, a certain amount of control is lost. If the partnership isn’t in good standing, and both sides (development and funding) don’t see eye to eye, the product suffers, or the company can be torn apart. When ars asked Lee what will happen to the Tapulous team now that he is leaving, he replied, “They will probably end up following me,” he said. “I’m not doing anything to encourage that, and have made sure each and every one of them is aware that I want them to stay at Tapulous and will not be recruiting them. If they didn’t end up staying at Tapulous, then I’m sure Apple would like to talk to them.”
Let’s just hope we don’t see the quality of these applications suffer.
via [Ars Technica]
[visit - Tapulous]
