Seth Fiegerman: Former Apple employee talks about why the App Store app review process is so long

Apple's app review process often makes many developers and users unhappy, but they don't know that these Apple app reviewers also have their own difficulties.

tim-cook-iphone-apps(from businessinsider)

Mike Lee, a former senior engineer at Apple (game note: he worked in Apple's global developer relations team), said that Apple's app reviewer is a tough job. First of all, the app review team, like other Apple departments, is often short-staffed.

According to him, "People always think that Apple has 100 app reviewers in India. In fact, this is the entire number of people in an Apple building. Like other Apple departments, the app review team often cannot find enough outstanding talents. Apple is not willing to use inferior talents to fill the gap of elite shortage by recruiting more people. I guarantee that the size of this team is much smaller than you think."

Worse still, the app reviewers are essentially dealing with a mountain of apps that, while there are some high-quality apps, are also rife with low-quality offerings, so the reviewers "may inadvertently filter out some gems."

App reviewers also often receive review applications for apps with sexually suggestive images, and they have to spend a lot of time "excluding apps that may contain sexually suggestive content." He told the media:

This is a very serious problem, so they have to try to filter out this bad content so that it does not appear in front of users. They will designate a person to sit there all day to filter out this kind of content. Apple does not want to use a large number of people, they insist on hiring really smart, well-educated, and well-trained members to do this job. This also means that some regular Apple employees have to do this full-time job of filtering bad content.

Lee said that this is the real reason why Apple has such a strict review system and can effectively exclude content with slightly erotic elements. This is not entirely because Jobs pursues the principle of keeping users away from erotic information, but also because Apple strives to review applications efficiently.

He pointed out, "The only way to solve this problem is to raise the standard of filtering out bad information, sometimes even apps with cucumber pictures will be rejected. Because if you don't do this, it will cause reviewers to spend a lot of time discussing whether certain content is pornographic, which is a very time-consuming practice."

via: gameboom