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Comment by spaghetti | Hacker News Reader

Honest question: why hasn't Apple fixed this fucking stupid review process?

They have the resources to pay cheap reviewers who are probably better than this guy. I'm sure college kids with no job prospects would jump to "work at Apple" even if it's making $10/hour reviewing apps.

Why not allow all apps into the store as long as they pass some security checks done by Apple (no downloading executables etc)?

The current review process is just encouraging developers to look at alternatives. Android for starters. I'm even spending time learning about Firefox OS. If Apple would stop rejecting totally legit apps for "having limited entertainment value" when my Mixpanel analytics say otherwise I (unfortunately) wouldn't give a shit about Android or any other mobile OS.

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"why hasn't Apple fixed this fucking stupid review process?"

Are you asking why it's not perfect? That's an impossible standard. In general app approval seems significantly ahead of where it was in past years.

"They have the resources to pay cheap reviewers who are probably better than this guy."

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that most large businesses have the resources to hire people better than their worst employees. Again if you're asking why their staff is not all 5 star employees who never make mistakes I don't even know where to start.

"Why not allow all apps into the store as long as they pass some security checks done by Apple (no downloading executables etc)?"

Because they don't want spam, porn, hate apps, whatever. It's easy to make sweeping judgements about what's best when you aren't actually managing a 200 billion dollar brand.

There's a difference between legit apps being rejected for silly reasons and spam, hate etc apps. You're right it's probably appropriate for Apple to draw some line when it comes to those apps. However my frustration comes from totally legitimate apps being rejected for non-sense reasons.

I don't expect the review process to be perfect. I'm just curious why Apple hasn't improved it beyond it's dismal state in the last four years.

Easy answer, spaghetti; Apple didn't build their review process for developers first, they built it for their users and Apple Inc (not necessarily in that order).

As a developer, I want free and easy access to the App store to upload my apps.

As a user, I want a selection of the safest, highest quality, predictable and elegantly design applications.

Apple Inc, as a for profitable organization, wants to ensure that they maintain control over the various revenue lines (and ensuing profit).

It's the only rational profit-maximizing-response for an organization that has their market dominance.

As a user, I want a selection of the safest, highest quality, predictable and elegantly design applications.

They've utterly failed to deliver that. They've been mostly successful in limiting outright malware but the store is absolutely bursting at the seams with cheap, crappy apps and scams. At this point they'd be better off delegating malware detection to an algorithm and using their editorial control to surface the good apps.

It's interesting to think about in terms of a rational profit-maximizing-response. Perhaps rejecting apps for silly reasons is Apple's way of trying to get rid of apps they deem crappy. This is only a problem when they label something crappy but users would enjoy quite a lot. But it might be a problem that's too small to care about when it comes to a rational response.

Apple's review process is unreasonably strict because it hurts them more to approve a bad app than to disapprove a good app. Apple takes responsibility for every user's iOS experience; people will blame them if an app ruins it.

I'm not sure if approving a bad app hurts Apple. If the app is truly awful customers can get a refund. Also the app store has some sort of collaborative filtering in place. Namely apps that are highly rated and/or downloaded a lot and/or some other reasons bubble up to the top. So apps that stink will just float to the bottom.

Is Google hurt when a bad webpage makes it into the search index? Not really. In general it just floats to the bottom.

Approving a bad flashlight app might not hurt Apple, but a bad app for payments certainly would.

Because for Apple and it's customers the app review process is not broken. It's only frustrating for of app developers.

Looking over the App store, if anything there is an over abundance of app developers.

I agree there's an over abundance of app developers. I wonder if the costs to Apple in terms of hosting all the free apps, paying reviewers, dealing with refunds and dealing with rejection appeals just isn't worth it?

However in a way the review process is broken for customers. Say I have a free app with 100 reviews and a 5-star average. The app has been downloaded on average 90 times per day for a year and the monthly average has been slowly growing (except for the initial release spike). Also the analytics show retention and daily usage going up. IMO it's safe to say that users like this app. Therefore users suffer when an update to the app is rejected or the app is pulled for superfluous reasons.

I would suggest if the example app with 100 reviews and ninety downloads a day was rejected, users would just buy a similar app.

Users are happy, ignorate that another app that may have been better was rejected. Apple is happy because revenue is revenue. Only the developer of the rejected app is not.

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