The problems with Apple's iOS App Store

This is going to be a rant. If you don't like rants, click away now.

I'm writing this more for me than for you. I just need to vent this frustration, and let's face it, Apple is kind of big now, so my little concerns are easily overlooked.

Now, the core problem here is that we goofed, we messed up, we didn't properly test before releasing a patch. This can happen to anyone, but certainly, it's easier to happen when you only have 2 people and you do everything yourselves.

Long story short, version 1.0.5 of our app was working fine, humming along, selling at least a couple in-app purchases every day. Nothing to quit my day job over, but at least we'll be able to pay for the developer license, and maybe even the domain names. Along comes update 1.0.6 adding a few fixes, and more languages to the list of localized languages. Unfortunately, a bug was introduced that basically breaks the app completely. It will crash right after launch after the user encounters the bug.

Of course we noticed the problem only a few hours after the update went live. We had a patch created and pushed to the store within an hour of that, even with parental duties and it being the weekend and all...

Fast forward 8 days, and we're still waiting on Apple to approve the patch. Now, this wouldn't be so bad, if we could simply pull version 1.0.6 and revert to 1.0.5.  However, that's not even possible. It wouldn't be so bad if there were some way to fast track our patch, to tell Apple, "Hey look, we need this patched urgently, our app is functionally broken". However, that's not possible either.

So, here we are pissing off real customers, and probably losing numerous sales, and generally generating bad will, because our hands are completely tied.

It really is frustrating.

Rant is over.

If you have something constructive like, hey, here's a way to fast track your app update, or hey, you know you could do "this" and disable your bad update, I'd really enjoy that.

Odds of 500,000 heads and 500,000 tails

If you flip a perfect coin* 1 million times, what are the odds that you would get exactly 500,000 heads and 500,000 tails?

A) 0%
B) 0.08%
C) 1%
D) 10%
E) 50%
F) 100%

Go ahead and try and explain your answer.

*perfect coin: A coin that has exactly a 50% chance of landing on either heads or tails.

Think of the simplest case. 2 coin flips. There are 4 possible outcomes, both heads, both tails, or 1 of each.

Wait, I just said 4 possible outcomes, then described 3?  Why?

Well, think of it like this:

HH, TT, HT, TH

Getting heads then tails is a different outcome than tails then heads, but both result in 1 of each. So, judging from that, you say, well 2 of 4, that's 50%, I knew the answer was E! Hah, not so fast...

Now, let's look at the next simplest case.  4 coin flips. Here are the possible outcomes:

HHHH, HHHT, HHTH, [HHTT], HTHH, [HTHT], [HTTH], HTTT, THHH, [THHT], [THTH], THTT, [TTHH], TTHT, TTTH, TTTT

So, there's 16 possibilities, and only 6 have equal numbers of heads and tails, I surrounded them in square brackets.  Uh Oh, that's 37.5% and it's probably going to get worse as we increase the flips towards 1 million. So maybe you're leaning towards answer C or D now, right?

From here I could go into the topics of binomial coefficients, pascal's triangle and other worthwhile, interesting topics, but I'll skip the heavy math and just show you dude's triangle.

     1
    1 1
  1 (2) 1   summed = (4)
 1 3   3 1
1 4 (6) 4 1 summed = (16)

Hopefully you recognize Pascal's triangle, but if you don't there's always Wikipedia.

We only care about every other case, as you need an even number of flips to obtain a perfectly even split of heads and tails.  You might recognize the numbers I put in parentheses. Those are the results we saw for 2 and 4 flips. So, now we just have to draw the next 999,996 lines of the triangle.

Don't worry, I did this on a separate sheet of paper, and the result was roughly 0.08%.

If you don't believe me, you can ask WolframAlpha