Apple’s App Review Fix Fails to Placate Developers

"Few reviewers have technical backgrounds"

This is a huge problem. Not only are reviewers rushed ("reviewers often have only minutes to review each app"), but they're not even competent to do their jobs in the first place. As an App Store developer, it's frustrating to me, because it's obvious that reviewers often don't have a clue. I have to explain the most basic things to clear up misunderstandings.

This is also why scams can so easily get through. Reviewers are no more sophisticated than the App Store customers who fall for the scams.

What I find most curious about the ultra-secretive Apple is that they're willing to admit they have only 500 total reviewers for all the millions of apps and updates. It's just an insane ratio.

I lost track of the number of times we got rejected for our app because the reviewer's Internet connection was down. "Can't log in, getting no connection to server error." Yeah dude, you need to connect to the Internet first.

One of the dumbest reasons I saw for being rejected was that our app's "invite a user by email" functionality (which only sends an email, nothing more) was mistaken for account creation and they wanted a cut of revenue.

> A former senior App Store operations lead, who requested anonymity fearing repercussions from Apple, says the guidelines are designed to work on precedent, similar to some aspects of law. New reviewers generally get about two months to become familiar with a database of previous app rejections and approvals chosen to set precedents for each guideline.

Unlike law, you don’t get direct access to this precedent as an App Store developer. Nor is it easy to actually invoke it when you are aware it exists. Calling out a reviewer when they fail to interpret a vague guideline in line with what Apple actually wants it to mean (which you have to do the hard work of understanding) is incredibly tedious and not guaranteed to show results. And if you don’t actually understand how the rules work, you’re basically stuck :(

While I was between jobs during the Pandemic, I decided to try to get a app into the app store, purely for my education. (I wanted to write an app to scratch an itch.)

I think I had to do about 5 rounds of submission. Some things they found were legit; but the biggest problem was the subjectivity and inconsistency: Sometimes a reviewer would find something that wasn't a problem, but the next reviewer would find something else that wasn't a problem.

It would be great if the reviewers could copy and paste a username correctly.