The new appeals process could save an app after it’s rejected, but developers say the most frustrating and time-consuming aspects of Apple’s process seem unchanged. An app can get bogged down in weeks or months of written exchanges with reviewers via Apple’s App Store Connect website before being formally rejected.
In 2020, Ben Fry saw his company Fathom’s Covid institution tracker app rejected for offering medical advice – a feature that was completely absent from the service. He turned to the appeals process after multiple exchanges with Apple, and the app was later approved without changes. Another of Fry’s apps was shot for not offering enough usability, but was accepted after a call for being “well-designed.”
Fry says his company now actively avoids the App Store and produces web apps instead. “Every experience I’ve had with submitting an app has been a nightmare,” says Fry. “Apple’s involvement is personally frustrating and a huge professional liability.”
Nelson, the London developer, was told that his app violated a directive aimed at preventing copycats. After appealing the rejection, a reviewer on the phone refused to tell Nelson which app he allegedly copied or which features to drop or change. Nelson resorted to a brute force approach, systematically updating almost every aspect of his game until Apple approved it.
Former members of the App Review team told WIRED that app rejections are vague because Apple’s app guidelines are vague and the company’s working conditions do not allow or require them to be interpreted consistently.
“We will reject apps for any content or behavior that we believe is excessive,” the guidelines read. “Which line, you ask? Well, as a Supreme Court judge once said, “I’ll know when I see it.” And we think you know it when you cross it too.” Fry and Panaitiu’s apps both met the guidelines’ vague requirement that apps provide “some sort of lasting entertainment value or sufficient utility.”
In 2020, former App Store head Phillip Shoemaker told US lawmakers that Apple’s developer rules were “arbitrary” and used against competitors. In a statement in the Epic lawsuit, Shoemaker said the qualifications needed to be hired as an app reviewer were that a person could “breathe [and] might think.”
A former senior manager of the App Store operations, who asked for anonymity for fear of repercussions from Apple, says the guidelines are designed to work on precedents similar to some aspects of the law. New reviewers are generally given about two months to familiarize themselves with a database of past disapprovals and approvals of apps chosen to set precedents for each guideline. Few reviewers have a technical background, the former collaborator says, and their decisions are often subjective and vary significantly between reviewers.
Apple says it employs nearly 500 reviewers who each view up to 100 apps a day to handle the hundreds of thousands of submissions in a week and together make more than 1,000 phone calls a week to developers. The former App Store lead says reviewers can only afford a handful of minutes on each case, making it difficult to rate every feature of an app, check for precedents, write developer feedback, or perform other steps in the review process. to feed.
Another former Apple employee, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, led a team of app reviewers and says the division was rushing. Reviewers were regularly reminded to work faster to better measure how quickly the team moved through the pending app reviews queue. “Customized communication is not well rewarded in the team,” says the manager.
Michael Gartenberg, a technology analyst and former Apple marketing director, says the company is unlikely to respond to complaints from app developers unless their experiences affect Apple customers as well. Until then, he says, “developers will have no choice but to abide by Apple’s policies or just make apps exclusive to Android.”
Rick VanMeter, executive director of the App Fairness Coalition, of which Epic and Spotify are members, says regulations requiring Apple to allow an alternative to the App Store on its devices would create competition that incentivizes both developers and better serve consumers. “Apple gets away with inconsistent rules and bias on its own because there are no alternatives to holding it accountable,” says VanMeter.
