Phil Schiller on App Store Knockoffs in 2012: 'Is No One Reviewing These Apps?'

ArtOfWarfare said:
You’ve got some major Stockholm syndrome or something.

The walls keep out the good apps, not the bad ones.

Think of all the great apps on your computer. Now think of all the great apps on your iPhone. There’s more and better apps on your computer. The devs would love them to be on your iPhone. Apple has rules to keep them off.

All the best apps on the iOS App Store may as well be web apps for how lousy they are.
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What? Many would disagree with that statement. Many users don’t even have computers anymore because they are unnecessary since the iPhone and iPads changed the dynamics.
 
I mean he’s not wrong, is he? My friend Bill Schmiller has been saying the same thing for years.
 
I can say from experience that Apple really has dropped the ball. My own game-- with 50 levels in it-- was approved in less than 24 hours. When an update was later rejected, I resubmitted the exact same thing a day later and it was approved.

From discussions with dev support, I'm now pretty sure it's just an army of low wage inexperienced kids pressing the "yes" or "no" button.
 
Yes, but "Everything is a remix."


Led Zeppelin ripped off identical blues songs.

Star Wars is a copy of Flash Gordon.

Etc. etc.

What's Temple Run ripping off? Probably something.
 
Moonjumper said:
Getting rid of scam apps is really difficult, but at least Apple is trying, which is why I lead with iOS on my app development (new games coming soon, honest, I'll finish soon, hopefully...).
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Copycats are one of the reasons I abandoned ios game dev this year. I have a decent game in a playable state but I'm not sinking another year into it just to have it ripped off. It happens to all the successful games on the app store so it's pretty much a guarantee.
 
Lemon Olive said:
It is indeed a difficult problem. And it does not work in the favor of Apple's arguments or that of its most fervent defenders. Despite Apple's best efforts at being a walled garden, the App Store is still a disaster. If it weren't, the BS claims made about why the iPhone should remained locked down would have more weight.
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The App Store is far from a disaster and it is still 10000 times better than the Google Play Store in terms of quality and available apps. Google doesn't even really review apps. I once accidentally pushed an update to my app out that literally made the app crash when users opened the app and it got through a Google review for the Play Store. It was just a couple of characters in a line of code that caused the issue, but if anyone at Google actually reviewed it, the app would not have worked at all, and should not have been approved. I discovered the error myself a few hours later and pushed another update out, but that would never happen with the Apple App Store.
 
warp9 said:
Apple gives refunds on apps, movies, and music but they don't advertise it.
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With Apple, you need to have a valid reason for requesting a refund, they won't refund an app because you don't like the app. You would have to be able to state that the app doesn't work as described or something similar.
 
KENPHOTO said:
With Apple, you need to have a valid reason for requesting a refund, they won't refund an app because you don't like the app. You would have to be able to state that the app doesn't work as described or something similar.
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I had been requesting a refund on some apps many times and I got approved every time.
I don't now if it's up to which country you are but there is a "right to refund" option for reasoning.
I did get a Youtube Premium refund after change my mind one day later.
 
The Cappy said:
Whatever. I'm a doctor. In the past I remember getting really angry because someone had problems that weren't caught by the nurses, and I asked something similar. "Is no one watching these patients?" But just because I said that, nobody could legitimately argue, "Well that means people don't need the ICU." Similarly, Schiller was just angry. His email doesn't invalidate what Apple is doing now, or what it was doing then.
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Yet I suppose that you’re not claiming that the only way patients should be allowed to be treated is through your ICU, because it is only way patients can be guaranteed to be safely and effectively treated.

Also, I bet that you don’t demand a 30% cut from the prescriptions that they buy from a pharmacy. After all, they were prescribed at your ICU. Technically, without you, people couldn’t legally buy the medication in the first place, and the pharmacies couldn’t make any money at all. So really the pharmacy should be grateful.
 
warp9 said:
Copycats are one of the reasons I abandoned ios game dev this year. I have a decent game in a playable state but I'm not sinking another year into it just to have it ripped off. It happens to all the successful games on the app store so it's pretty much a guarantee.
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Not trying to be sarcastic or anything, but are you even going to try publishing your game anywhere? If yes, how would publishing it elsewhere stop the copycats from then publishing it in the iOS App Store?
 
sublunar said:
That fact that he's looking for automatic tools to weed out scams shows they are hoping to avoid paying (intelligent) staff to do the curation. Wonder if that's why Podcasts and stuff hasn't been that great either. Maybe they need to consider staffing up a bit.
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Any tech company nowadays reaching a certain size, if they don’t offer physical goods or actual service, they just want to hire the fewest number of people, preferably a handful, and automate everything else, outsourced or not. Heck, Twitter can be operated completely by AI if Twitter so desire, or Google, or Amazon. Apple is no exception. Staffing is always their last resort.
 
I just want to say how I love that all these articles about the trial show documents that say "Extremely confidential", "For the jury eyes only" , "Privileged and Confidential".

How can these documents leak so easily?
 
Interesting to see Phil Schiller's reactions, sounds like any Apple critic here on Macrumors, on ridiculous stuff going on at Apple.

More troublesome though is the little oversight if any on some of these services, and only Apple executives like Phil exploding when it's too late. We are seeing the same thing happen with the recent Podcasts UX fiasco. No accountability, no oversight.
 
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Shirasaki said:
Any tech company nowadays reaching a certain size, if they don’t offer physical goods or actual service, they just want to hire the fewest number of people, preferably a handful, and automate everything else, outsourced or not. Heck, Twitter can be operated completely by AI if Twitter so desire, or Google, or Amazon. Apple is no exception. Staffing is always their last resort.
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And how is automatic "curation" going?
 
It’s just too easy 30% to run the store, but who’s watching? Speaking of software upgrades does anyone make share apps are compatible before pushing an update? I lost 10+ years of photos upgrading to iOS 14.5 no one seems to care.
 
CWallace said:
I believe it is more a response to probably the sheer number of App submissions. I would expect the goal is to try and use automation to weed out the "problem" apps that can be detected via this method which would allow the human reviewers to focus on the more complex/sneaky apps.

And you really just can't "throw people" at the problem. I've lived through the "The Mythical Man-Month" approach to problem-solving - we literally spent billions of dollars and hired hundreds of contract engineers at a very complex project and we still ended up years late and even more billions over before we dragged it across the finish line.

So Apple trying to hire tens or even hundreds of thousands of human App Reviewers (if such a thing was even logistically possible) would not be a "magic-bullet".

The above being said, I do believe Apple should consider a "Bad App Bounty" like they (finally) did with the Security Vulnerabilities. Developers now do the leg-work on counterfeit and scam apps because it impacts their bottom-line. Others do it out of a sense of altruism / community improvement. Some do it just to try and shame Apple into being more serious than they think they do. Offering a small bounty identifying these apps to bring them to the attention of the existing App Store review and moderation process would help improve the store and relations with legitimate developers and the positive PR of a better App Store experience is worth a couple million in bounty payouts.
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Hey, this is a great idea.
This way that hypothetical “automated” filter might come to fruition who knows, some time later, from the same bounty hunters trying to come up with tools and get better at catching and spotting scam apps.
 
colonel179 said:
I just want to say how I love that all these articles about the trial show documents that say "Extremely confidential", "For the jury eyes only" , "Privileged and Confidential".

How can these documents leak so easily?
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Someone putting a label on documents (what we call a “designation”) does not mean that the documents deserve the designation. Anything being referred to in these articles is stuff that the parties agreed (or the court mandated) can be publicly shared.
 
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