Out of the millions that use the App Store, I reckon not many know about the heavily criticised process of how the apps themselves get accepted or rejected. Apple has taken a lot of stick for their stringent regulations, but a fascinating Business Insider article reveals that being the person at Apple who accepts or rejects those apps isn’t as good as it sounds.
Mike Lee, a former engineer at Apple reveals why it can be a real stinker of a job:
“People have this idea that there are 100 people in India doing app reviews,” Lee tells Business Insider. “It’s just people in a building at Apple, and like every other part of Apple, they can’t get enough really good people. Apple will not compromise the quality of its teams to fill it in. I promise you its a lot smaller than you imagine.”
Furthermore, he explains that it’s incredibly easy to accidentally accept a rubbish app over a great one. Reviewers may ‘may accidentally toss out the gem’ he says.
He continues with expletives:
It’s a very serious problem, trying to filter out things that no one is there to see. Somebody has to sit there and filter out all those d*cks. You can’t let all those d*cks get through. You have to err way on the side of safety. You have to have people sitting there looking at things that may or may not be d*cks all day long. Apple refuses to farm stuff out to massive groups of people. They insist on having actual smart, educated, well-trained people doing the job. So that means they have to have some of their actual employees sifting through a pile of d*cks.”The only way to deal with it is to set the bar so far away from d*cks so that even a picture of a cucumber gets blocked by accident,” he says. “Because if you don’t, you have people spending hours and hours of conversation on whether something is a pubic hair. It’s a huge waste of time.”
So if your app gets rejected, it might not be that’s its bad or hasn’t met requirements, it could just be a mistake by an understaffed department at Apple. It’ll be interesting to see if anything changes in the future, but for now it seems that the process isn’t going anywhere.
