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Comment by andrewljohnson | Hacker News Reader

Meh, ode to nothing. The App Review process sucks. I develop apps, and it's the second biggest pain in my behind, next to the App ad hoc provisioning process. We deal with it, but thank you sir, I don't want another.

1. It's capricious.

2. It doesn't catch actual bugs, and then you have to wait to fix them.

3. Apple doesn't engage you easily on questions of whether something or another will result in rejection.

4. Apple changes the rules and block random releases, without communicating rules changes until they reject you.

5. Apple makes it harder to plan marketing campaigns.

I haven't had a new app rejected in probably over a year, and only rarely have they blocked one of my releases, but every time it sucks, and I don't know why they bother.

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The process may suck for the developers but I agree with the article that it creates benefits for the end users. It's a core part of Apple's philosophy to cater to their customers at all cost. I am certain that apple pushes its own staff very hard to produce the quality of work they do, and when you sign up to become an Mac or iOS developer you become essentially an apple employee or contractor and as such you have to follow the company culture and philosophy just like the internal staff. It has been working for them, the company is thriving so why change course?

I think there may be merits in the arguments made for third party app repositories for iOS but I believe that there is some value, real or imagined in knowing that an application has the stamp of approval of the company that created the platform.

>> 2. It doesn't catch actual bugs, and then you have to wait to fix them.

Apple aren't your QA team.

They claim that is part of the reason they review apps, and Marco in his article claims they raise the quality of apps.

Both these claims can still be true. I have had a but get through twice, and eventually it was picked up by the app store reviewers, because it was such a hard to replicate bug.

It is certainly true that some QA is better than no QA. Even professional QA's miss some stuff.

No. They are looking for crashers and obvious glitches (as well as malicious code and using APIs that might change and break the app in the future).

While they do try to ascertain that your app does what you claim it does, they are not there to test your logic.

It is possible that their QA involves checking whether an app uses prohibited API or whether it crashes the system or hogs memory etc. It is obviously a high level QA. Just search and see how many "task killer" apps available on Android device.

Also, I think if this app-review process is not beneficial to users, I dont think they would have started this in the first place. Sure, it is an issue to thousands of developers, but it is beneficial to millions of users.

Business related motives could be a big reason as well. But, who is not?

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