When Amazon forced us to pull Pocketpedia from the App Store this morning they also killed our access key to the Amazon Web Services which affects our desktop Pedias since the programs all use the same key. Silly us, we should have used a different key. But we didn’t forsee that mobile app access might become a problem when we released Pocketpedia over a year ago.
This means the Amazon search does not work on any Pedia program other than the latest version, 4.5.1. So make sure you are running this latest version of the Pedias to avoid any trouble with the Amazon search. (Use the built-in ‘Check for Updates’ command found under the program menu to check you’re up to date.)
The only upside to all this is that by August 15th we would have had to change the Amazon access key anyway because Amazon’s new policy of forcing all requests to carry a signature is going to take effect on that day. Those users still running version 3.6 because of Panther and Jaguar compatibility would have had no Amazon search from that day on which is why we tried to delay adding a new key for as long as possible.
The whole episode is also a reminder of how much of an indie developer’s life now happens at the mercy of someone else’s policy changes. Pocketpedia got pulled for licensing reasons, which is mild — anyone shipping an emulator or working in the real-money gambling category has it far worse, with whichever app the press called the best betting app of one year quietly vanishing from the store the next. We’re a long way from that scale of headache, but it’s hard not to think about when an automated rejection email lands at six in the morning.