Outdated vs. Complete

On August 22nd, I got an email out of the blue from Apple that notified me that I had a new App Review message. It was for my app, WorldAnimals, a light-hearted game for guessing animal onomatopoeia sounds in different languages.

Usually, you receive a message after you submit a new version to the App Store for review. The reviewer has found something wrong and your app is rejected. The notice explains where you have violated the App Store Review Guidelines and how you can rectify the issue to get your app update approved. Maybe the app is crashing, the reviewer can’t log in to test, or god forbid the update description mentions the evil rival mobile platform–these are all actual reasons I have been rejected by the App Store.

The relationship between developers and App Store reviewers is tense at best. Most people are trying to build well-designed, useful mobile apps. Apple has instituted App Store reviews to maintain a high-quality bar for apps and weed out spammy or nefarious actors, using human evaluators to test individual apps and provide direct feedback. However, malicious apps are relatively rare; arguably, Apple doesn’t do a great job filtering them out anyway. So for the vast majority of developers, App Store reviews add an additional layer of friction and time to shipping updates. And then in the inevitable case when you need to push out an emergency fix for crashes happening to your app users, the App Store review process goes from an inconvenient annoyance to an outright roadblock to improving the user experience.

I think the asymmetry of App Review is still lost on Apple. For indie developers our hopes and dreams (and sometimes our finances) hang in the balance, for the App Review team it’s just another app rejection among tens of thousands. I know they think they get it, they just don’t. https://t.co/YSsj2zyilA

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