We’ve developed almost twenty applications in the last nine months, including those we developed for our contract customers. We’ve spent much of our time working on iPhone, but at the same time, our work with iPhone and Apple has changed us, too. The expectations and demands we make upon ourselves as designers have increased dramatically.

Great design and interaction are a huge part of the user experience for iPhone applications, and the more we experienced and learned what is possible, the more we desired to refine our work and take full advantage of what the platform has to offer. Creating our first iPhone apps was a very fulfilling experience, but like an artist looking back at early sketches, we soon began to spot the flaws and see the shortcomings of our initial efforts.

We’ve made some great applications, but for a variety of reasons, our own applications have largely kept the same user interfaces that we introduced them with when the app store opened, and we feel that we can do better. The cognitive dissonance resulting from this situation started to become intolerable late last year.

By the time we went to Macworld we had already decided that we were going to focus on raising the level of polish and focus on our applications as much as possible. The addition of Chris Clark to our team raised the bar for us even higher.

Black Pixel means good design. To us, that means quality, innovation, beauty, and fun. We are pushing ourselves hard to develop applications that adhere to these principles. Effective immediately, we have decided to pull all of our applications from iPhone App Store until they are up to our own standards.