Cult of Mac: a blog about the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone - and the people who love them

Schiller Defends App Store Approvals, Ignores Key Points

7:04 am, November 23rd, 2009, Craig Grannell

BusinessWeek ran late yesterday an interesting article interviewing Phil Schiller about the App Store. While it’s good to see Schiller again talking publicly about the approvals process, it’s sad to see Apple still ignoring key issues.

A store you can trust

Taking Schiller’s points in turn from that piece, he first says:

We’ve built a store for the most part that people can trust. You and your family and friends can download applications from the store, and for the most part they do what you’d expect, and they get onto your phone, and you get billed appropriately, and it all just works.

In terms of the App Store itself, he’s right. The process is simple and it just works. The problem in the above quote is in the line “and for the most part they do what you’d expect”. This is true. They mostly boot, and they mostly work. They mostly do what it says on the tin. However, there are thousands of bug-ridden apps in the App Store, because it takes weeks for developers to get critical updates through the approvals process. Compare this to the Mac desktop where they just upload a revision or use Sparkle to fling up a dialog when you boot the app, asking you to update.

This in itself is perhaps the biggest issue with the App Store, and one Apple needs to address. Its desktop model is built on quality and stability, but its mobile platform is fast becoming one full of apps by great developers but that is, on the whole, buggy in a worryingly random manner. And if you’re not a very savvy user, you can’t downgrade when things go wrong.

Review and reject

Schiller’s next points centre around the concept of gatekeeping. He notes:

Whatever your favorite retailer is, of course they care about the quality of products they offer. We review the applications to make sure they work as the customers expect them to work when they download them.

Most stores—digital and traditional—are reactive, in that they respond to problems as and when they occur. Clearly, Apple thinks that by being a gatekeeper and checking every app before it’s placed online, its platform will be safer and stronger. As noted earlier, this isn’t the case when it comes to app bugs, but with 10,000 apps reportedly coming in every week and Apple’s team taking around 12 minutes per app (two six-minute sessions, each one by a different person), how much testing can you do beyond booting the app up and fiddling about with it for a few minutes? With something like a currency exchange app, you might just be able to work through the app’s functionality in a few minutes, but with anything more complex you’re merely skimming the surface.

Furthermore, there are far too many apps where Apple uses subjective means to determine whether or not they should be on the store. Apps are deemed ‘offensive’ and are therefore blocked from the store; but one relatively high-profile rejection was Start Mobile Wallpaper Gallery, offering an image of the Obama Hope piece that’s in the Smithsonian. The app has since been approved, and the initial rejection was clearly an error. But this only goes to highlight the problem in catering for subjective offensiveness, and also the gatekeeping mentality in general, since it took weeks for the rejection to be overturned.

Trademark issues

Schiller also talks about trademark issues:

If you don’t defend your trademarks, in the end you end up not owning them. And sometimes other companies come to us saying they’ve seen their trademarks used in apps without permission. We see that a lot.”

This is one area that it’s hard to get angry with Apple about. The system is clearly open to massive abuse—witness Tim Langdell attacking Edge and then Killer Edge Racing via spurious means, or Stoneloops! of Jurassica getting kicked off the store by its rival for supposed rights infringement, despite the accuser’s own app being a rip-off of an earlier game, a version of which is also on the store. However, Apple’s (reasonable) stance is to let these companies come to an agreement themselves, reinstating apps as appropriate.

But sometimes things go too far, notably when considering Apple’s rather bizarre notion of infringement relating to its own products. Tapbots had a release of Convertbot rejected because the icon used for time was similar to the ‘Recents’ one in Apple’s Phone app. More recently, an update to Rogue Amoeba’s Airfoil Speakers app was rejected for using images of Apple products. The app transmits audio from Apple products to an Apple mobile device, and the images, available via Mac OS X, showed which device you were connected to, enhancing usability.

Apple would argue that its rules state developers have access to these images on Mac OS X but not on OS X iPhone, but with a company so keen on integration, it’s odd to ‘punish’ developers in this manner; worse, with Airfoil Speakers previously being approved, this again highlights the problem in gatekeeping and dealing with updates. A buggy app can be approved, and then the bugs can be fixed but Apple will during its next six-minute check find in the update something it doesn’t like but didn’t notice during several previous checks. An app with several previous approvals can suddenly find itself in the sin-bin, despite the update waiting for approval being a critical fix. (And even if this doesn’t happen, and the approvals process is as smooth as it can be, it still usually takes over a week for a bug-fix to get online.)

The age game

Issues regarding age ratings for apps are also becoming common. Innocuous apps—many of which merely connect to the internet—are saddled with a 17+ rating, and this seemingly cannot be disabled by households with people only aged over 17. But there is inconsistency in the way ratings are applied: some such apps are 4+, despite enabling access to far more content than those that are 17+. Worse, the ratings only show extremely generic warnings. It’s one thing to say “17+: enables access to internet content”, but instead you tend to get:

Infrequent/Mild Alcohol, Tobacco, Drug Use or References to these
Infrequent/Mild Horror/Fear Themes
Frequent/Intense Mature/Suggestive Themes
Infrequent/Mild Sexual Content or Nudity
Infrequent/Mild Profanity or Crude Horror

Fixing the App Store

I sincerely hope Apple’s listening, but progress appears to be painfully slow, and high-profile developers are making threatening noises. It’s hard to see where they’ll flee to in the mobile space, but should Android start making traction, Apple shouldn’t be shocked if it suddenly finds a lot of its best developers heading for greener grass.

To stop this happening, Apple should:

• Enable proven developers to have expedited updates, especially for bug fixes.
• Speed up approvals in general. Apple has a cash mountain, so presumably at least some could be thrown in the general direction of App Store approvals.
• Remove subjectivity as much as possible from the approvals process.
• Provide more indicative approvals ratings, rather than generic ones.
• Relax a bit when it comes to developers using iPhone/Apple images/icons for purely explanatory content.

Posted by Craig Grannell in News, Opinions, Top stories, iPhone Apps | Comment on this article