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Apple: open up approval process for iPhone App Store

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Apple is still heavily filtering and manually approving App Store submissions. Interestingly enough, a majority of these applications are created and used by people outside of Apple.

Today, news of the recent tweetie application’s rejection made me realize that this should not be Apple job… these apps are often created and used by a community outside Apple. As such, Apple should respectfully allow it’s users and developers to help approve applications for the App Store. We have seen this work in the past and I think Apple could make it work… it could start as a simple “yet to be approved” portion of the App Store that could be voted on by the community and pushed into “approved”.

I hope they don’t continue to make this kind of mistake going forward.

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rwdaigle
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Oooh, nice one! Apple could really benefit from at least the preliminary approval round being handled by outside users.

We’ve had some of our apps rejected for absolutely ridiculous reasons, clearly by somebody over-interpreting some corporate policy document and with no contextual consideration.

This is a real strong idea.

rwdaigle about 1 year ago

keyan
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I definitely agree that the approval process should be improved. One of the reasons Apple keeps a tight leash is to make sure none of the apps break their ToS. Problem is, they have too many rules interpreted too broadly by their reviewers who try to reject the illegit ones before they get on the app store. Other reason is to make sure the apps run smoothly, don’t crash & and make the iphone resemble windows machines, etc :)

That said, there seems to be too many cases of rejections for pretty trivial reasons (e.g. the tweetie app).

I think they should trim down the list of criteria that make an app an automatic reject to those concerning privacy breaches, malicious software, etc. You can download songs from the iTunes music store with explicit content for $0.99, why can’t you get an app that has some curse words?

keyan about 1 year ago

rod
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how would you envision a more open process playing out?

rod about 1 year ago

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