The internals of App Review’s testing — quite fascinating! It seems like they create a trust score of your app based on a list of binary & metadata criteria, and then review what’s changed between versions

Reviewers claim app submissions as they go through, and are then notified which elements have changed since the last approved version

Gotta wonder just what kind of slide decks were prefaced with snarky developer Twitter quotes over the past decade

Apple acquired SourceDNA in 2016 to improve the automated binary analysis portion of App Review

Apple was looking at AppThority too, but didn’t acquire them. Looks like Symantec did, though, a couple years later

As of 2015, there were 910 (!) different rules and other criteria that App Review used to approve/deny apps. Only a fraction of those are actually communicated to developers in the App Review Guidelines

Here are the top ten…

App Review’s static analysis includes checking for cookie-cutter apps, and the strings in your binary. Dynamic analysis runs your binary on a test farm and sees what you’re actually doing at runtime

Am I reading this right? watchOS only has 17,551 apps in its ecosystem (as of 2019)?

If you’ve ever wondered why App Review is faster for tvOS and macOS, it’s because combined they have less than a thousand submissions a week. Just 27 new tvOS apps, and 152 Mac apps that weren’t updates

The vast majority of iOS apps on the App Store support iPad, making for ~1.1M apps

About 73 new apps for watchOS are submitted every week

Total apps on the tvOS App Store: 10,009 (as of 2019)

I guess this one washed over me: Apple rejects ~two thirds of new apps submitted for iPhone

Total number of macOS apps on the App Store (2019): 27,240.

Compare that to the 1.1M apps available for iPad and you can see why Apple would make some of the decisions it has over the past few years to try and unify the development process to align it to iOS

A couple of thousand requests to expedite App Review are made every week (as of 2017). That number feels way lower than I expected — I guess more developers than I’d imagine avoid expediting where possible

Apple says it has about 500 App Reviewers — if ‘overtime’ here means what I’d think it means, does that suggest that app reviewers work 7 or more hours of overtime every week?

Roblox was rejected for having minigames, and appealed to the App Review Board, saying that they would only add/remove minigames with submissions and not remotely. Nobody on the board replied to the email, so Roblox was given the go-ahead

Apple can end your business and not bother to reply to your email asking why or how you can change. Tribe was thrown under the bus (UTB) by another app developer presumably wondering why they had been rejected, and as a result got thrown out after 3 years on the App Store

XcodeGhost spooked Apple into making an acquisition of SourceDNA

XcodeGhost infected 2,500+ apps on the App Store and 128M customers, 55% of which were in China

96% of developers Apple surveyed in its ecosystem (in 2017) develop for iPhone. 82% for iPad. 16% for Mac. 12% for Apple Watch. 10% for Apple TV. 9% for iMessage

Apple thinks developers are liars or idiots for telling Bloomberg that they — correctly — were approved to be on the App Store. There was no rule at the time to justify removing them, so Apple did it anyway and invented one after the fact

Apple didn’t want to come out publicly and say so, because it knew it had no actual rule to point to

Apple got so sick of bad Flash/AIR apps on the App Store that they considered adding ‘Flash’ to the list of disallowed trademarks for App Review

Turns out it’s developers, via the developer agreement, that are responsible for ensuring the quality of apps on the App Store, not App Review at all. This is not surprising, but it could be an important distinction

The idea was floated to build Apple’s digital storefronts right into the OS shell in a way that no third-party store or service could emulate. Clearly 2010 Apple was not expecting to run into serious antitrust issues a decade later