Court docs detail Apple's app review process: 500+ people review ~100K apps/week, app rejection rate is less than 40%, less than 1% of rejections are appealed

As the Epic Games v. Apple court case goes forward, we have been learning more details about internal discussions within each company about their business models and more.

9to5Mac 2021-05-08 Filipe Espósito

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@itchio Itch.Io on x
guys, Apple's lawyers just called. They said we need to turn off ALL the games 😭 Games Are Now ILLEGAL
@mslopatto Elizabeth Lopatto on x
“one of the problems with limiting competition is that you don't get innovation,” says the judge. “one of my concerns is that if you aren't letting parties compete on these topics, things won't improve.”
@ballmatthew Matthew Ball on x
Here's Apple's very dubious rationale seven months later Roblox doesn't have games but “content experiences” https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/...
@stroughtonsmith Steve Troughton-Smith on x
Here are the top ten... https://twitter.com/...
@stroughtonsmith Steve Troughton-Smith on x
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 https://twitter.com/...
@stroughtonsmith Steve Troughton-Smith on x
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 https://twitter.com/...
@stroughtonsmith Steve Troughton-Smith on x
Apple didn't want to come out publicly and say so, because it knew it had no actual rule to point to https://twitter.com/...
@tha_rami Rami Ismail on x
This tweet is 2 * 4 + 7 an Apple-approved game. https://twitter.com/...
@stroughtonsmith Steve Troughton-Smith on x
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 https:/…
@tme_michael Michael Burkhardt on x
probably because they take so long to respond to appeals, so most people just resubmit https://twitter.com/...
@stroughtonsmith Steve Troughton-Smith on x
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 https://twitter.com/...
@tomwarren Tom Warren on x
if you're confused about this itch tweet, Apple has been arguing against other app stores on iOS by highlighting sexual games on itch today 🙃https://twitter.com/ ... https://twitter.com/...
@thedextriarchy Adi Robertson on x
Itch was added to the Epic Games Store shortly before the trial. Allison says Epic just hosts Itch, not the games themselves. These games are “so offensive we cannot speak about them here.”
@stroughtonsmith Steve Troughton-Smith on x
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 https://twitter.com/...
@gartenberg Michael Gartenberg on x
It's looking like this isn't going to be a slam dunk for Apple. How long does an appeals process take? https://twitter.com/...
@reckless Nilay Patel on x
First time the judge has really come at Apple's control of the platform having downstream effects from lack of competition https://twitter.com/...
@reckless Nilay Patel on x
Between the App Store and the Facebook Oversight Board, the idea of huge companies having legalistic rules and closed appeals processes is now firmly a part of the American political and economic landscape. It's weird!
@josephfcox Joseph Cox on x
New: as part of discovery in the Apple + Epic lawsuit, we've now seen previously unreported figures on what might be the biggest hack against iPhones ever on record. 128 million users, 18 million in the US. Apple seemingly didn't inform all victims https://www.vice.com/...
@patrickwardle Patrick Wardle on x
Seems the goal at Apple is to find bugs before ...the community!? 🧐😂 ...(naively?) thought the competition would be cybercriminals? You know the ones exploiting users🤷‍♂️ https://twitter.com/...
@ihackbanme Zuk on x
🤯 this is just mind-blowing. We can only guess what's happening on iOS. Based on amount of threat-activity that I see almost every day - it's the wild west. #transparency #FreeTheSandbox https://twitter.com/...
@patrickwardle Patrick Wardle on x
Want to infect more than 100M users? ...leverage the Apple App Store!? 🤔😭 https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/...
@krausefx Felix Krause on x
Closed source SDKs, closed source dev tools, they all come in handy https://krausefx.com/... https://twitter.com/...
@k_sec Kurt Baumgartner on x
walled gardens fail big when they fail https://twitter.com/...
@lorenzofb Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai on x
To be clear, we asked Apple if they notified victims, as they were discussing in the emails. The company pointed us to an FAQ it published at the time, that makes no mention of that. https://www.vice.com/...
@lorenzofb Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai on x
NEW: Apple has finally revealed how many people downloaded malware that hackers snuck into thousands of apps in 2015. -128 million across the world, 18 million in the US. Compamy considered emailing them all, but it's unclear if it ever did. https://www.vice.com/...
@lorenzofb Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai on x
This is the incident known as XCodeGhost, where someone put malicious code into a copy of XCode, which was then inserted in popular apps like WeChat and the Chinese version of Angry Birds 2. https://www.vice.com/...
@reckless Nilay Patel on x
The real risk of this trial to Apple all along has been that we will see how much of software economy on top of the iPhone is explicitly restricted so it can be monetized to Apple's benefit. And the answer turns out to be: a lot!
@kantrowitz Alex Kantrowitz on x
Apple “may walk away from the trial freshly motivated to appease developers over the long-term, and avoid future lawsuits that could potentially be even more embarrassing than this one,” writes @markgurman https://www.bloomberg.com/...
@nickstatt Nick Statt on x
Here's are the documents where Apple employees talks about white-listing companies like Hulu for privelaged use of App Store APIs, like the cancel/refund API. https://twitter.com/...
@steipete Peter Steinberger on x
Hulu got access to the internal cancel API for subscriptions and (some time later) implemented a flow to migrate subscribers to their own payment system? Bold. https://twitter.com/...
@thedextriarchy Adi Robertson on x
Just to be clear, the argument here is that experiences *inside* Roblox (which IIRC there are actual game studios devoted to building) are not games, because otherwise Roblox could be arguably similar to the Epic Games Store in being a store inside the App Store.
@kifleswing Kif on x
Some discussion in court about Apple buying SourceDNA, a startup that automated checking apps for malware. Here is an Apple director's email making the case to buy them. I believe this is an 2016 Apple acquisition that went unreported until this trial (one of many.) https://twitt…
@leah_nylen @leah_nylen on x
Forrest is asking Fischer about an Oct 2018 email. “Hulu is part of the set of whitelisted developers with access to subscription cancel/refund API.” Fischer acknowledges that “whitelisted developers” have access to some APIs and features that other developers don't
@iansherr Ian Sherr on x
Also, the always-insightful @drbarnard, getting under Apple's skin: https://app.box.com/... https://twitter.com/...
@drbarnard David Barnard on x
So now we know... “Hulu is part of the set of whitelisted developers with access to subscription cancel/refund API.” Sure hope Apple exposes that to the rest of us at some point. Google Play allows developers to trigger cancellations and it's great for customer support. https://t…
@drbarnard David Barnard on x
Over dinner I told my wife one of my tweets ended up in a court case against Apple. Her first reaction, without even knowing what it said: “Is Apple going to retaliate?!” So yeah, for almost 13 years of making a living on the App Store, we've lived in fear of Apple.
@thedextriarchy Adi Robertson on x
Fischer says from time to time, it wants to test a feature with a small group before rolling it out to all developers.
@drbarnard David Barnard on x
I know so many kind, amazing people at Apple that have been so helpful to me over the years. But I think it's lost on Apple institutionally just how disfuncional it's relationship with developers really is. How much we fear App Review. How much we fear speaking out.
@drbarnard David Barnard on x
On an episode of the @SubClubHQ podcast, @ncsh commented how Salesforce runs its developer platform as a “benevolent dictator”. That's been rattling around in my head since the moment he said it. In contrast, Apple comes across a bit more... Machiavellian. https://castro.fm/... h…
@nsexceptional @nsexceptional on x
This is a clever way to make a blanket statement that gives you plausible deniability when accused of unfair treatment. “We were just testing X with [Developer] before we made it available to everyone!” Even if it takes years, and years 😒 https://twitter.com/...
@nickstatt Nick Statt on x
App Store chief says no developer receives a special break and that all App Store rules are applied equally. Amazon would beg to differ. https://www.theverge.com/... https://twitter.com/...
@leah_nylen @leah_nylen on x
“In this particular case, it was something we were testing with a few companies to see how this feature would perform with the intention if it performed well we would roll it out to all developers.”
@larsiusprime @larsiusprime on x
The “what is a game” debate apparently having a lot of real world stakes in this trial. My dumb understanding here is Apple is trying to say that user-created content in Roblox don't count as games, because to do so would undermine their case against Epic? https://twitter.com/...
@reckless Nilay Patel on x
Epic vs Apple continues to reveal how deeply in the weeds of specific app functionality Apple will get when it suits its interests — and that they have the levers to do it. https://www.theverge.com/... https://twitter.com/...
@tzeejay Constantin Jacob on x
For anybody interested in this, these are the APIs that Apple announced at last years WWDC stating that they're available “now”. Spoiler: they are absolutely not yet available to developers in any way https://twitter.com/...
@sledsworth Steven Ledsworth on x
Tim Cook: “We treat every developer the same.” https://www.youtube.com/... 🙄 https://twitter.com/...
@reckless Nilay Patel on x
I don't know if Epic can or should win here — it's pretty messy! But it is more abundantly clear than ever that Apple puts a lot of time into making every dollar that flows through the iPhone also flow through Apple.

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Court docs detail Apple's app review process: 500+ people review ~100K apps/week, app rejection rate is less than 40%, less than 1% of rejections are appealed

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