App Store Follies

Pretty much every time that news breaks regard­ing yet another fuckup with the iPhone App Store approval process I get a slew of emails and tweets prompt­ing me to opine on the sub­ject. In gen­eral I haven’t done so, not because I don’t have an opin­ion on the sub­ject, but because I fear that my opin­ion would not be well under­stood. Nonetheless, I’m going to take the time now to lay out my thoughts on the whole sad, sorry affair.

John Gruber over at Daring Fireball pub­lished a piece today titled Excerpts From the Diary of an App Store Reviewer. It’s funny, with John’s char­ac­ter­is­tic dry wit. It’s also wrong.

As an aside, I want to make it per­fectly clear that I’m not claim­ing any spe­cial knowl­edge regard­ing this sit­u­a­tion, and I don’t think that John is either. I’m merely spec­u­lat­ing based on what I’ve seen in the last year, and my own expe­ri­ence with sim­i­lar processes at other companies.

John seems to argue, in his humor­ous way, that the core issue with the App Store approval deba­cles is the indi­vid­ual review­ers act­ing capri­cious for their own per­sonal rea­sons. He writes:

I could read that over and over. It’s like the voice of a robot. The voice of author­ity. The voice of author­i­ta­tive robots. I feel a surge send­ing it. I can imag­ine that for the devel­oper on the other end the expe­ri­ence must be like that of speak­ing to a wall. A mono­lith. But it’s a wall that might actu­ally be lis­ten­ing. That on the other side of the wall might be — must be, no? — a human being, an at least rea­son­ably smart late-20s/early-30s guy with a B.S. in comp sci who grew up in the same cul­ture, shares the same inter­ests. Someone who in broad demo­graphic terms is more or less exactly like him. Someone whom he could not just relate to but rea­son with. Someone who, if pre­sented with the sim­ple facts, would surely see the absur­dity of the stated rea­sons behind this app’s rejec­tion. … Rejecting all of them, con­sis­tently, would in fact be no good at all. The feel­ing of being part of the mono­lith — of being the mono­lith — really only surges when I use my posi­tion to act capri­ciously. To act fairly would be to fol­low the rules. To act capri­ciously is to be the rules.

This is where John and I must part ways. Where John, and his imag­ined devel­oper imag­ine the App Store reviewer to be a guy “more or less exactly like him” I make a very dif­fer­ent assumption.

My view of our imag­i­nary reviewer is much the same as that expressed by Mark Damon Hughes in his Twitter response to John’s article:

@gruber I love the app store reviewer diary, but the plod­ding, method­i­cal, unthink­ing, rigid rules behav­ior? Classic Indian out­source work.

While I don’t agree that the behav­ior we’ve seen from the App Store review process is nec­es­sar­ily indica­tive of Indian, or even out­sourced work, it is very indica­tive of the call cen­ter mentality.

The vast major­ity of peo­ple who have com­mented on the App Store approval process, dis­count­ing the talk­ing heads of the New Media Douchebag echos­phere, have been cur­rent or for­mer soft­ware devel­op­ers or IT pro­fes­sion­als. It is nat­ural for them, like John’s fic­tional devel­oper to imag­ine that the review­ers should be peo­ple like them. I, on the other hand, have my roots firmly in the land of call cen­ter oper­a­tions, and I can tell you that the peo­ple that man the cube-farms are as vastly dif­fer­ent from soft­ware devel­op­ers and IT pros as they are from Manhattan socialites.

It wasn’t always this way, but for the most part now your aver­age cube farmer is a mind­less drone who is actively dis­cour­aged from ever apply­ing his or her own crit­i­cal think­ing to a sit­u­a­tion. He or she is given a set of guide­lines to fol­low, and if you can’t resolve the issue using them in the alloted time then you ditch the issue using any means available.

The prob­lem is that, while the vast major­ity of App Store sub­mis­sion deci­sions are no brain­ers (and let’s be hon­est, the per­cent­age of ques­tion­able rejec­tions that are gen­er­at­ing this con­ver­sa­tion is van­ish­ingly small), the dif­fi­cult cases are, to be blunt, dif­fi­cult. So, when a devel­oper sub­mits an app that trig­gers review based on the guide­lines that Apple has pro­vided, it may land in the queue of some­one with some crit­i­cal think­ing skills and be approved, or it may land in the queue of some­one who slav­ishly fol­lows the rules to the let­ter. Even worse, an app that made the cut when first sub­mit­ted will almost cer­tainly be reviewed by a dif­fer­ent per­son when being updated, with poten­tially dis­as­trous results.

So, what’s to be done? First I have to repeat that every­thing that I wrote above is pure spec­u­la­tion, I could very well be wrong about this. Second I want to empha­size that I’ve writ­ten this not to absolve Apple of the prob­lem, but to help the devel­op­ers out there under­stand just why it seems that Apple is act­ing like a spas­tic crack mon­key. Given that, here are my rec­om­men­da­tions to Apple:

1. If this review process is, in fact, being han­dled by out­sourced labor bring that shit back in house! Outsource may be cheaper, but this process is too impor­tant to leave to third parties.
2. Attach some iden­ti­fy­ing infor­ma­tion to the App Store rejec­tion let­ters. Part of the frus­tra­tion of the rejec­tion process is the anonymity of the review­ers. Developers have no idea if their app is being reviewed by one per­son or a multitude.
3. Publish clear approval/rejection guide­lines with spe­cific exam­ples of what may or may not trig­ger rejection.
4. Create and ade­quately staff an appeals queue, and make it clear to devel­op­ers when they are com­mu­ni­cat­ing with the front line mon­keys as opposed to the  higher-ups.
5. Create a process for devs to obtain a pro­vi­sional “pre-approval” for apps. I agree with the devs who are com­plain­ing that it’s unfair for them to com­mit resources to an appli­ca­tion that may be rejected.
6. Fire who­ever at Apple owns this process. A year is too long for some­thing like this to be pub­licly broken.

So, there you have it. My per­spec­tive on the sit­u­a­tion from some­one who’s done time in the trenches. I may be wrong, but I’m bet­ting I’m right.