The App Store Review Process Needs Fixing
Though allegedly focused on benefiting users (through better safety and compliance), App Store review in its current form mostly frustrates the people it claims to protect.
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Those are all scammy apps that got through. Apple’s review capacity isn’t infinite. Every hour a reviewer spends poring over a bug-fix update to an app that’s been in the store for years is an hour not spent catching the fake LastPass app.
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And the review process is fundamentally flawed anyway: It works best with developers who are trying to do the right thing. Plenty of apps pull their content, features, and behavior from servers their developers control. Feature flags, remote configuration, and web views mean an app can behave differently the day after approval than it did the day of vetting. A determined bad actor can get past App Review. An honest developer just waits in a slow, nebulous line.
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At WWDC 2020, the company announced that bug fixes for apps already in the App Store would no longer be held up over guideline violations (except for legal issues); developers could address those problems in a subsequent update instead. That’s a good policy! Based on developer complaints I’ve seen, Apple hasn’t honored that agreement.
He suggests a Trusted Developer Program.
Previously:
- Not Muse in the App Store
- Ternus and the App Store
- TabControl Scam and the App Review Queue
- Small Ways the App Store Could Be Improved for Developers
- Mac App Store Review Times Increasing
- Allowing Bug Fixes and Challenging the Guidelines
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This has been suggested for a long time and for the record I agree. It doesn't solve all problems but it creates no new ones and solves a major glaring issue.
I just don't see anything changing here until some major external force causes them to have a "come to jesus" moment, like AI did with Siri. If ChatGPT hadn't come along, Apple would have been perfectly happy to have the same awful Siri for the next many decades, all the while telling us how amazing and capable and trusted it is.
That's where they're at with the App Store. They say the few lines that are technically legally true and ignore all the unpleasant realities. But even worse in this case because those scams make them money.
So really the only way to get them to clean up the App Store is going to be major governments around the world enforcing the same legislation making Apple responsible for copyright infringement and scam losses.
I don't know how that would work but I can't think of anywhere else to hurt Apple the only place the care about, in the wallet.
Apple doesn’t handle well the bureaucracy it already has with App Review, and I worry that any new program (even one designed to fix something) will just be implemented poorly and make things worse somehow.
It’s sad that so many egregious examples of scams are SO EASY to find (e.g. if you just spend 10 minutes looking at Top Grossing), and Apple can’t even do that. They need to prove they can fix the low-hanging fruit first.
