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Apple 'Surprised' By Developer Frustration With Its App Review Process

cupcakes2000 said:
Apple maps is vastly superior to Google maps if you consider privacy a priority.

Apple Music is great, Spotify is great- very little real difference between the two.

iMovie and pages are fine for what they are- free basic apps. What’s the problem? There are better apps than these by both 3rd party devs and Apple themselves.

iMessage is pretty well respected, and safari is hardly ten years behind anything, especially iOS. Ridiculous thing to say.
I for one have no interest in putting any Facebook, Google or Microsoft apps on my phone, and take a great deal of time vetting any other third party apps I may install.
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Apple maps: perhaps in U.S. Everywhere else it's a bit of a dud.

Apple Music: for the company that invented iTunes and the iPod it's simply inexcusable that its UX is so far behind Spotify's (yes, it is).

iMessage.. like with Maps, outside of the US very few people use it. Safari is OK, my personal qualm is whenever I get this awful dialog

Ew0gE8hVkAQgFnW.jpeg
 
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thejadedmonkey said:
Is it illegal to lie to a government watchdog group? If not, it should be, because Apple is certainly not surprised by any frustrations. At least, they wouldn't be if they spoke to even a single iOS developer.

I don't know a single developer who developes iOS apps because of Apple's review process and policies, usually it's despite Apple and their shenanagins.
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I run an Australian based small development company that has a top selling app in the Australian App Store and I don't have any major issues with Apples review process.
 
If Apple does NOT want a particular app in the App Store, & does NOT have a legitimate reason NOT to have it in the App Store, they will reject it, & provide a Total BS reason for doing so.

And, if you try to RE-submit it, it never progresses into "In Review".

They did precisely that for my "iPhone Unit Sales Estimator" app, called Timmy.

Also, to put things in perspective, I give Apple a D- grade for the current state of the NON-Game portion of the iOS App Store.

Apple's Mgmt is (clearly) obsessed with Game Apps & promoting Apple Arcade.

A recently-proposed First New Law would require Apple to disclose per-Category Revenue Numbers for (at least) the iOS App Store here in the States, & require them to do so "at the end of each work week".

And, last but NOT least, to specify what percentage was generated by the Top 10 apps in each category, as well as what percentage of apps in each category that generated NO revenue.
 
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The problem with all those Stats, 70% blah blah blah in 24 hours is that vast majority of the Apps for review are Games. Those tends to be the easy part. The hard part comes from real Apps. And those tends to be problematic.
 
Apple is surprised about this?

It's less frustrating to try and explain your app to a brick than one of Apple's reviewers! It's such an awful and frustrating experience. My worst ended with a call that went really badly, where they still refused to refuse to approve the app. Then a few hours later they randomly approved it.
 
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Cosmosent said:
If Apple does NOT want a particular app in the App Store, & does NOT have a legitimate reason NOT to have it in the App Store, they will reject it, & provide a Total BS reason for doing so.

And, if you try to RE-submit it, it never progresses into "In Review".

They did precisely that for my "iPhone Unit Sales Estimator" app, called Timmy.

Also, to put things in perspective, I give Apple a D- grade for the current state of the NON-Game portion of the iOS App Store.

Apple's Mgmt is (clearly) obsessed with Game Apps & promoting Apple Arcade.

A recently-proposed First New Law would require Apple to disclose per-Category Revenue Numbers for (at least) the iOS App Store here in the States, & require them to do so "at the end of each work week".

And, last but NOT least, to specify what percentage was generated by the Top 10 apps in each category, as well as what percentage of apps in each category that generated NO revenue.
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Before Apple is forced to disclose in-depth numbers in the App store, this will go to Supreme Court. It will take years for a law like this to ever be enacted, if ever.
 
azentropy said:
As a developer you of course want things less stringent, but as a customer you would want things more stringent. Too much junk is already let through IMO.
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This has nothing to do with being stringent. Read the article and the comments. Learn the facts before posting.
 
otternonsense said:
Apple maps: perhaps in U.S. Everywhere else it's a bit of a dud.

Apple Music: for the company that invented iTunes and the iPod it's simply inexcusable that its UX is so far behind Spotify's (yes, it is).

iMessage.. like with Maps, outside of the US very few people use it. Safari is OK, my personal qualm is whenever I get this awful dialog

View attachment 1747565
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I live in France and maps is perfectly fine.
 
jdavid_rp said:
Between the Play Store review system and App Store's one, I really prefer the App Store one. Apple is more picky about how things should be done, but its far better than waking up to see your app DELETED from the Play Store without a real reason and with an ambiguous explanation. Then you have to send them a support email that will take longer to get replied than you sending another build to the Play Store that they will allow and then AGAIN delete it from the Play Store for the same dumb reason and the same ambiguous explanation and you end looking for the solution on internet.
When Apple got confused with my app and rejected the new build I just sent them a message explaining how the issue was not a real issue and the build was uploaded the same day.
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Considering the huge amount of money they're getting, they could actually hire enough people to check apps, along with improving their automated processes.
 
KENPHOTO said:
I am am the director of a small (6 staff) Australian based app development company and I have to say that overall, I have never had too many dramas or issues with app reviews. I have 5 apps that I update almost weekly, and have been doing so for the past three years, so I have gone through a lot of app reviews in that time. 90% of the time, my app updates are approved within 12 hours (60% of the time within 8 hours). Once in a great while, as other people have said, I will get a rejection for something that has been approved 100 times before, but when that happens, I just self reject the build and resubmit it the next day and it gets approved without issue. The few times (and I mean like maybe 10, tops) that I have had to actually fix something and resubmit a build, I have not had any major issues. It is always stressful when a build gets rejected, especially on a new app, but overall I just have not had the problems that people are complaining about here. I also made a submission to the ACCC in this case saying exactly what I have said here. For all the complaints I see people have about Apple and the App Store, like most developers, 65-70% of my app sale income comes from Apple. When a consumer purchases an iPhone or iPad, they are (or should be) well aware that it is a closed garden App Store and always has been since they first launched the first iPhone. Not sure why people complain about it when they could just as easily go and purchase an Android phone and use the Crapsung store or some other store if they wanted to. Google allows other App Stores and to be honest, no one uses them, most developers just use the Google Play Store.
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Nice to hear from you Phil.
 
billk711 said:
They could get rid of 80% of junk apps and no one would notice,
They should do a developer rating, so many crappy useless apps out there.
Apple should make all their own apps,
#1 would be better
#2 don't have to listen to whinny developers
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Apple's apps are a complete dumpster fire. But yes, why don't we have Apple write a billion more apps to replace every third party app.

When you get a chance, lets us know how Apple would replace the following apps given that they don't own any of these companies:

Netflix
Word
Excel
Amazon
Spotify

Jesus.
 
I had tried submitting an app a long time ago. Without going into details, it was a very basic baseball card app that linked to public info online for stats. I was worried it’d be rejected for somehow being related to the MLB or copyright.. It was rejected for a lack of content and functionality. This was back when you could buy an app that simulated drinking a beer or shooting an AR-15. Back then there wasn’t really any way to appeal. Seeing now what troubles promising devs have to deal with, it’s very intimidating.
 
EdT said:
You may have just said the quiet part out loud and I hope that there isn’t anything Apple can do to link your post to your developers account.
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Retaliation on Apple’s part for something like that would be very very bad for them in the press. I doubt there’s need to worry about that.
 
caloon said:
As an iOS developer, I am frustrated with the process. The review guidelines do not get applied equally and are sometimes even misinterpreted by the reviewers.
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Same here.
Once I got rejected for a particular message on screen, it was the 8th revision of the app and I had the same message from version 1.
I remember when I worked on an app for a bank, I asked for the sex on the registration page (mandatory for law in my country) and the reviewer rejected the app because I thought it wasn't necessary to ask the sex. Had to copy/paste the regulation to have the app approved.
Then you see scam apps on the store and everything is fine for Apple.

I'm happy to be an Apple developer, but I mostly work on enterprise apps and it is nice to deploy them without having to deal with app review :)
 
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We recently submitted an app update to the app store at 5:55pm, it was in review at 6:00pm and approved at 6:07pm. Clearly the reviewer spent almost no time at all looking at the app and just rubber stamp approved it. Other times, they nitpick all kinds of things - it really is frustrating dealing with them.
 
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MacRumors said:
Article Link: Apple 'Surprised' By Developer Frustration With Its App Review Process
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With something like ~1.4 million app publishers having published apps the Apple App Store, it's not surprising that Australia could find a seemingly significant number of publishers who are frustrated or unhappy with app store reviews or processes. I say seemingly because 20,000 unhappy publishers out of 1.4 million is ~1.4%. 20,000 is a big number, but so large when put in context. Add consumers and suppliers who likely have complaints not related to the complaints of the publishers (perspective is everything) and ... you see where this is going? Raw numbers can be deceiving.
 
bousozoku said:
Considering the huge amount of money they're getting, they could actually hire enough people to check apps, along with improving their automated processes.
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The flip-side are the resources that are devoted to the review process are not known. Sometimes adding more resources doesn't really make a workflow or process any faster or better.
 
I don’t believe the “surprised” statement. Though, I know and understand the frustration that some developers have. The issues with most of the App Store Reviews is that it is left to a HUMAN - not all humans read and process information the same (if you need an example, look no farther than a MR article forum). Unless Apple can train each of their reviewers to be carbon copies of their best reviewer who never has any negative feedback from developers, because he/she/they takes care of them, we will forever have these issues.
 
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