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Is there a legitimate way for Apple to fix their review system to both block less legitimate apps and more scammy apps? AFAIK following is true about app store:
by TrainedMonkey 5y ago
Is there a legitimate way for Apple to fix their review system to both block less legitimate apps and more scammy apps? AFAIK following is true about app store:
1. Number of apps/updates is huge.
2. The process of app review is based on a lot of policies (not talking about developer guidelines from documentation). Some of the policies, let's be charitable and say supermajority, are pro consumer. Some exist to protect business interests. Some are probably outdated or based on miscommunications, misunderstandings, or just plain misguided. Apple is a big company, and it is likely there is a lot of politics that goes into crafting app review policies.
3. App policies change as Apple tries minimize false positives/negatives and keep control of the ecosystem.
4. Because of 1, number of people working on this has to be substantial.
5. Because of 4, it's fair to assume some of those people will be bad at their jobs or at least have more protectionist interpretation of app policies which will result in more false positives.
6. Because of 2, 3, and 5 some of the cases will be misjudged. We mostly hear about good apps being blocked and terrible apps being let through, so it's hard to estimate the error rate in review process.
7. Big enough companies have Apple people embedded to smooth the process over. This is interesting, because it inherently gives big companies an advantage.
8. It is fair to assume that Apple has internal app review false positive/negative metrics that they optimize for. Given the size of the company and amount of investment here, those metrics are probably somewhat high.
Looking at the above, two most obvious to me ways Apple could try to improve the process:
1. Make process review more transparent - this will definitely help false positives, but also likely will increase amount of false negatives.
2. Put someone in charge who could cut through the politics of app review policies and instill a better culture. Problem here is that situation could turn out worse as well.
- swiley 5y agoF-droid does it, here are their rules: https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Inclusion_Policy/ https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Inclusion_Policy/ So do most Linux distros, which have very similar rules.