You may occasionally wonder why Apple allows so much crap into the App Store. Despite there being thousands of excellent apps, hundreds of thousands of apps in the App Store’s 600,000+ catalog are worthless pieces or junk and/or knockoffs. Apps often slip into the store that should have never been allowed in the first place, and Apple has to pull the offending app after everyone else takes notice.
Apple employs a small group of people to approve each app that is submitted to the App Store. Mike Lee, a former senior engineer at Apple, has shed some light on what life is like for the people who guard the gateway to the largest and most vibrant app ecosystem in existence.
Depending on your perception of how well the App Store review team does its job, a couple images may come to mind. You may think that the review team is composed of a bunch of random people in India making minimum wage, or perhaps a smaller group of white collar workers sitting behind iMacs at Apple HQ in Cupertino. Lee told Business Insider that “It’s just people in a building at Apple, and like every other part of Apple, they can’t get enough really good people. Apple will not compromise the quality of its teams to fill it in. I promise you its a lot smaller than you imagine.”
Apple’s reviewers spend most of their work days rejecting garbage. So much curating takes place that a team member “may accidentally toss out the gem,” according to Lee. Steve Jobs famously said that “Folks who want porn can buy an Android phone.” According to Lee, Apple has such a strict policy on pornographic material in apps not only because of the company’s core beliefs, but because it makes sifting through app submissions faster.
Here’s what Lee told BI:
It’s a very serious problem, trying to filter out things that no one is there to see. Somebody has to sit there and filter out all those d*cks. You can’t let all those d*cks get through. You have to err way on the side of safety. You have to have people sitting there looking at things that may or may not be d*cks all day long. Apple refuses to farm stuff out to massive groups of people. They insist on having actual smart, educated, well-trained people doing the job. So that means they have to have some of their actual employees sifting through a pile of d*cks.
Here’s to hoping that Apple can build up its App Store review team to handle all of the genitalia and crapware.
Source: Business Insider
Alex Heath is a journalist who works for Tech Insider. He’s the former co-host of The CultCast. He has been quoted by the likes of the BBC, KRON 4 News, and books like “ICONIC: A Photographic Tribute to Apple Innovation.” He lives in Lexington, Kentucky. If you want to pitch a story, share a tip, or just get in touch, additional contact information is available on his personal site. Follow him on Twitter.
7 responses to “What Life Is Like For An App Store Review Team Member At Apple”
The problem is that outside of the USA, no one has the same prudish attitude to sex. When people talk about better app reviews and screening, and keeping the crap out of the store, they don’t mean d*cks (or p*ssy for that matter), they mean SCAMS and CRAPWARE.
So … kudos to the smart dedicated employees at Apple keeping us free from genitalia, (because of course no one even knows why that looks like), but what we really want is for you to remove all the scummy, copycat, not-even-really-an-app apps.
“…build up its App Store review team to handle all of the genitalia”
Come again?
A few rules that would clean up the app store *completely* overnight:
1) Every app must have a CLEAR max. 300 char. description of what it is and what it does right at the top.
2) No review of an app can be *less* than 300 chars.
3) Books (how-to’s, helper-apps, magazines, etc.) will not be accepted as apps
4) Websites (collections of art, wallpaper etc.) cannot be apps
Rules 3 & 4 would immediately remove about 30% of the content from the store (but it would all be CRAP).
Rules 1 & 2 would make all the remaining apps easily understandable, searchable, and rateable.
I suspect they look for such things as well but it doesn’t make for as amusing an article
there ARE apps that fall into those realms that are useful. fitness apps, photo-related (camera photos, not instagram photos) apps and dietary apps come to mind. that criterion would have to be further refined.
Why the hell don’t they crowdsource the reviews out to their Apple Geniuses? Or just the employees in general?
At least as far as catching the really bad ones before the coders look at the apps.
Wow he’s not a spammy F**k tard C**t!