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Manual reviews are useful if and only if reviewers are well trained, understand what is good and what is wrong, and do care about what they are doing.

There is a ton of anecdotes from iOS/iPadOS devs in the tweet thread that prove that some reviewers don't care at all about what they are doing: apps have been rejected for bad reasons, apps have been rejected except that the rejection screenshots were for... another apps(!!), and sometimes rejected for absolutely no reason.

It is a shame to see Apple that see devs as evil people, until they prove they may be angels... however, devs money smells like the other for Apple.

6 comments

The value of manual reviews seems to be undermined by the inconsistency from the perspective of the developer.

It seems like Apple's intent here is to create an ecosystem with a general rule of "don't be a prat", but is struggling to quantify the precise definition of "prat", and where the line sits, and what sits closest to the line, on each side of it.

That Apple doesn't allow anyone else to provide payment services or app distribution is a separate question of antitrust, but increasingly it looks like (putting aside the cash cow nature of extracting revenue from developers) this is starting to become a problem that doesn't have an Apple-esque problem to it.

Content moderation is inherently quite subjective, as the hyper scale social platforms are discovering. Apple is effectively trying to do highly technical content moderation, through (as I understand it) a web of outsourced contractors with varying levels of understanding of the content matter. It's starting to get to the point where this will surely impact on consumer confidence and reputation? Apple's annual SEC filings acknowledge the potential material revenue impact if they can't continue to hold a monopoly on payment processing and distribution on the store.

It seems like any antitrust/competition action taken there may implicitly force the issue of app review to be fixed or disrupted (allowing competing stores would let them do their own review, or choose not to do manual review as they wish). Perhaps that's the long-term likely outcome, even if not one Apple would wish today. They could then use their walled garden as a competitive differentiator and see if they can compete with others to win customers on that basis. That could give a very significant incentive to improve the developer experience, lest developers shift to a store with a better experience.

The app review process is never going to be perfect.

There are 2+ million apps which assuming average 10 updates over their lifetime = 20+ million reviews. Of course there are going to be mistakes, differences in interpetation between reviewers and edge cases.

But situations like this show exactly why a review process is useful. A keyboard app with network access is something that deserves a lot of scrutiny.

It doesn't need to be perfect, it needs to be accountable. That means the rules must be clearly stated and unambiguous, the reviews should strive to give consistent results, a rejection should be comprehensive and actionable, and there must be an independent appeals process.

From what I gather, both Apple and Google are failing at consistency, comprehensiveness, transparency, and the appeal process.

Does it actually need to be accountable to the app developers?

Both Google and apple seem to do fine without that accountability

One of my colleagues has just been through this rigmarole with the review process.

Apple kept rejecting it as it would crash when logging in. We didn't get any crash reports and could not replicate any issue ourselves. Several submissions later, the decision was made to put in a whole bunch of analytics and tracing, we get the logs back and... The "crash" was a pretty clear error message because they weren't following the simple 2 step login instructions provided to the reviewer.

We kept getting rejected by a reviewer who couldn't log in (we'd attached credentials to our submission). When they finally sent a screenshot with the rejection, it turns out they were using 'login with Google' and then entering the credentials we gave them there. Needless to say, they needed to use 'login with username/password'.

I'm an iOS dev. We've had multiple rejections of our apps because we added a "promo code" button to the paywall, which literally displayed the Apple sanctioned code redemption sheet from StoreKit. Rejected because we "offered a purchase method outside of the App Store." App review is an absolute joke. We get through it via escalation, but we always expect a week or two of update downtime with every bug fix release for something stupid like this.

The solution to half the rejections I have had from app stores has been to resubmit it.

This has worked numerous times in the past for me as well, spanning years now. Superficial rejection? Upload a new version of the same binary and resubmit.

This is simply akin to calling up some place again, perhaps for a discount on a bill, hoping you get a new representative that will give you what you want. And it works...

No human is going to be able to review every app correctly every single time. Misunderstandings will always happen.

It sucks and it is annoying, but what you do when it happens is reply with more explanations, and eventually the app will be re-reviewed and approved. I have had to do it quite a few times. Losing your temper over it helps not at all.