Former Apple Employee Gives A Tiny Look Into App Store Review Process
by Brent Dirks
July 4, 2012
Think the App Store review team is a bunch of dicks? Think again. Instead, they are apparently too busy sifting through pictures of the male anatomy. Mike Lee, a former Apple senior engineer who worked on the Worldwide Developer Relations team, recently spoke out about the process to Business Insider.
Lee offers a small explanation of why the various scam and rip-off apps have slipped through the cracks as the team is very busy sifting through the trash.
“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.”Wow, where do I sign up? And shockingly, (OK, not really) Lee said that the team of reviewers is understaffed for the massive amount of apps submitted:
"People have this idea that there are 100 people in India doing app reviews," Lee tells Business Insider. "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 it’s a lot smaller than you imagine.”While Apple is trying to the best it can by blocking pornography and other trash from the App Store, I think the company needs to do whatever it takes to bulk up the number of reviewers while making the process more transparent for developers. It’s definitely a shame to hear Lee say that the occasional gem may be tossed out with the trash. You’d think the most valuable publicly traded company in the world could find more people that would want to work there, right? Source: Business Insider
