Hacker News Reader

Comment by n9com | Hacker News Reader

This is very worrying. Due to a small minority of scammers, the entire dev community is being made to pay.

Right now, iTunes Connect is pretty much broken. Sometimes your screenshots won't appear on the App Store, and you have to keep re-uploading them until iTunes Connect decides it wants to properly sync with the Apple CDN servers - even when that happens, often the screenshots order will not be the same as what you set.

Also, this is going to increase review times. Now devs will have to submit 'updates' just to change their screenshots.

What Apple should have done is offered an alternative screenshot review process, that does not require a new app binary to be submitted. Essentially, this current implementation just wastes everyones time.

View on HN

If they had a screenshot review process then people would be annoyed they had to wait for screenshots to go through review, same as they are now.

Basically, Apple is more interested in protecting their customers than they are about making developer lives easier. As a developer, that's annoying, as an Apple consumer the fact they're taking steps to block scammers is a net positive.

I'd rather wait 1 to 2 days for a quick screenshot review process than 2 weeks as it is now to submit a new binary (and waste the reviewers time for having to review a binary that is actually the same as the previous version) just to change my screenshots. Also, users will then see a pending update for the app, which they will then have to waste time downloading.

Who says it'd be 1 to 2 days for a screenshot review process? I can't see Apple dedicating a team to it, they'd probably dump it in the same queue as app submissions, and whilst a screenshot is significantly easier to test ("Does it look like the app? Yes. Done"), it's still going to not be a one day turn around.

It's a crappy solution to a crappy situation basically.

Dedicating a team? They'd probably outsource it to some business services company.

The real root of the issue is, why do apps called 'Pokemon Yellow' and 'Halo 4' get approved without Apple checking to see if they are published by the rights holder?

I can't say I know for certain, but I thought outsourcing things like that was a bit outside the handbook for Apple?

they outsource the manufacturing of the iPhone don't they?

True, but that's something that occurs at such scale that it'd be unfeasible to try and implement internally.

And when the new update comes out, all the user reviews get wiped/obsoleted.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com