I got rejected this summer under the “too simple” guideline – which was really shocking for a number of reasons. First, this app took me over a year to develop and had hundreds of thousands of lines on the back-end. The frontend UI was purposely developed to mask this complexity, which I’m sure is what the rejection was based on; however (point two), I had just two weeks earlier had a second app (that used the same backend) approved, and had basically the same front-end UI. This second app was for a different use-case, which is why I had built two apps. In summary, two near identical (99.9 percent) apps. One approved. One rejected. Fairly capricious.

I don’t want to come off as a negative apple basher (and I’m going to provide some thoughts on how they can improve their process), but in my opinion, Google is about a thousand times more developer friendly than Apple. I won’t go into full detail about how many times I was on the phone with customer support about problems solely due to Apple. However, I will mention a few things that struck me as suboptimal.

One: as everyone knows, the time-lag for approval is absurd. PG wrote about this here http://www.paulgraham.com/apple.html. By the time I had submitted my app for approval and was in the hold queue, I had a new version ready (with new features and bug fixes), but didn’t want to resubmit and lose my place in the queue. Having to wait two weeks for an approval was painful. SUGGESTION: why doesn’t apple put a numeric limit on when apps get reviewed? It doesn’t make sense to me for an app with zero downloads to have to go through the same scrutiny as an app that has millions. Most apps, I’m sure, never even cross 1,000 downloads. Freeing up resources to review apps that most users have, seems to make a lot of sense.

I also don’t understand how Tim Cook, who comes from a supply chain background, doesn’t see even a 1 week approval as horrible. Best in class inventory management has a principle called JIT (just in time) inventory management, which has the goal of making inventory lead times as close to zero as possible. To me, waiting 2 weeks to get an app approved is the equivalent of having a 2 year lead time wait for inventory.

Another possible suggestion is that Apple pre-approves certain apps under certain conditions and then only reviews them once they hit a certain download limit. This way, new apps that are constantly being iterated, would be able to get out to users.

Two: the testing process (pre-review) is also absurd. I had to use TestFlight app, which was a nicely built app (recently acquired by Apple, who then shut down the Google features…). However, as a giant company, you’d think they would make beta testing much easier. Perhaps, they could use the same download limit (allow all users the ability to install say 5 beta apps), without having to go through getting a user’s device info, etcetera.

Three: I have no idea why Apple outsources their corporate check to Dun & Bradstreet. If you are a corporation (which I submitted under), this adds weeks to your first getting your app even reviewed. As a giant corporation, Apple should not stand for making developers wait weeks just to have their identities verified before having their app reviewed.

I’m guessing the reason that all these sub-optimal features exists is because of the duopoly power of Google and Apple. Really, what’s needed is a powerful software developer union that could force Apple to make these changes. I’d nominate PG for the role, but I think he’s retired. Maybe dang could take up the cause.