First people complain the app store has a ridiculous approvals process and people keep getting rejected unfairly. Now people complain that they are too loose and letting in shovelware. What’s it going to be?

I wonder if I made an app that was simply a front-end for the actual app store if it would be approved. We wouldn’t be an alternate app store. We would always link to the actual app store for purchase/installation of apps. We just provide an alternate index of apps for searching where all the shovelware is removed.

This is actually part of the reason why people complain about the approvals process.

Your entirely legitimate app will get rejected for some confusing, badly described reason you have to guess at, meanwhile an obvious rip off with terrible functionality slides through without comment.

> First people complain the app store has a ridiculous approvals process and people keep getting rejected unfairly. Now people complain that they are too loose and letting in shovelware. What’s it going to be?

It's actually both.

The problem with establishing lots of hoops to jump through, is that legit organizations can't deal with it, but scammers have no problems playing the game. It's just the cost of doing business, for them. They learn how to game the system, because that's their business model.

I don't usually have problems, when my apps get rejected by the Apple App Store Review. I get the thing fixed after one or two back-and-forths, but it's still a big fat pain.

I do think that the scammers have figured out how to ram through a lot of crap, though, and Apple needs to look at this.

First, though, they need to consider it to be a problem. If each of the shovelware apps makes them a bit of money, they will be more willing to "look the other way," than for free apps (like the ones that I do). I believe that I am held to a higher standard than scammers.

Both can be true. I've done mostly web, but I now work for a company that ships both iOS and Android apps and the cost of dealing with both Apple and Google app store compliance/review is not negligible.

At the same time, I'm sure they're both getting blasted with knockoff apps that find ways to stay just within the letter of the law, if not the spirit of it.

> I wonder if I made an app that was simply a front-end for the actual app store if it would be approved.

It would not, as the primary purpose of this entire enterprise is to maintain total control of all aspects of the market, including discoverability.

This is squarely on Apple. Everyone knows the mark of a trustworthy store is that they will direct you to their competitors when they don't have what you're looking for.

The web doesn't have a approval process at all and yet when I search "AI Chat" I don't get a bunch of borderline trademark violations on the first page of results. I get the real ChatGPT and Claude and Character.ai and Poe and some other startups that don't exist just to fool people. And I get links to the app store when appropriate. Scams exist on the Web too but that doesn't mean you need to promote them to people.

Apple and Google and any app store provider have the ideal goal of zero friction for real, valuable apps and infinite friction for bad, scam apps. They can never hit that ideal, but when you're getting rage from both ends it's likely that you are in a place on the continuum that is far below ideal—you make it a huge pain for real, valuable apps and too easy for bad, scam apps. This appears to be where the Apple store is, at least, and it's an unfortunate place to be. They may be doing their best, but it sounds like their best has some pretty significant room to improve.

> What’s it going to be?

It is that the quality of the app store itself sucks. I noticed this a long time ago when they had over 100k apps.

This is like the company cafeteria, or the food vendors at the stadium/etc. The quality doesn't have to be good if you're the only game (allowed) in town. Your choice is to get in line like everyone else.

How many company cafeterias or stadium bars could survive downtown where people can actually pick and choose based on the quality of the food and service?

the answer is obviously, competition.

It's a well known security problem. An attacker in this kind of environment is spending very little money per app, and gets a payoff for breaking through: The application process is their business. Someone actually building an app is focusing on the quality of their app themselves, and not getting through an approval gauntlet. The ratio of applications that are crap or scams vs apps that are trying their best and have reasonably good quality is abysmal.

If you catch 99.999% of scam apps, and incorrectly slow down 1% of honest developers, you end up with an app store that is full of scams, and the developers are unhappy.

This is a deep misunderstanding, on multiple levels, not the least of which being: Mac App Store submissions, as far as I'm aware and have experienced, go through the same horrible approval process that iOS App Store submissions go through. The reason why no one complains about the Mac App Store process is because the only people who regularly submit apps to it are scammers and low-effort vibe-coders.

> First people complain the app store has a ridiculous approvals process and people keep getting rejected unfairly. Now people complain that they are too loose and letting in shovelware. What’s it going to be?

At best a walled garden is collective bargaining -- a group of users (buyers) lock into requiring vendors to negotiate with their representative, and because their business is collectively valuable vendors have to meet higher privacy standards or whatever the users care about, which they couldn't extract if negotiating individually with huge companies like Facebook.

So, Apple will get yelled at whenever it fails to be a good agent in collective bargaining -- either by excluding quality vendors and driving up their costs, or by including low-quality vendors. Either one gives up the benefits to users of the walled garden.

An index of reliable apps is, you know, fine. An index with a business structure that ensures better collective bargaining gets interesting.

> What’s it going to be?

It could be both. Black box systems that reject useful tools without explanation "because they don't want to be gamed" but also don't reject shovelware because they didn't break an unspoken rule, isn't exclusive.

I think the answer is better curation and ranking. And perhaps some sort of reputation system (eg. This app is by OpenAI vs “This app is by some unknown spot”)

It's like they built an iron gate but forgot to install a doorbell

It's both? They have a ridiculous approvals process considering the approvals process doesn't even work. They say they have to block all these legitimate apps as an accident of having tight security, but then they don't actually have tight security. Half the time it seems like the criteria for approving an app is how much ad revenue it brings the app store owner. Everyone who makes a legitimate app has stories of having updates denied after 3-4 weeks for no reason or a stupid reason, then resubmitting, and having it approved after another 3-4 weeks. And then they claim they need a 30% cut of all your income in order to pay for this process there's no possible way to eliminate even though it doesn't achieve its stated goals at all. Their stock price says they're not spending very much of it on that process.

I bet Apple's and Google's own apps don't have to wait 6-8 weeks. Maybe it's purely anticompetitive.

Edit: Oh, and the fact they get away telling such obvious lies without constantly being called out 24/7 by millions of people speaks to the power dynamic in play.

People can complain about false positives and also about false negatives.

We could have the worst of both options. A process that lets shovelware through but at the same time gives lots of trouble to legitimate app creators

It's going to be that it was always all about the bottom line, and only the bottom line.

Approvals never stopped shovelware, that always seemed to get free rein.

> First people complain the app store has a ridiculous approvals process and people keep getting rejected unfairly. Now people complain that they are too loose and letting in shovelware. What’s it going to be?

When the ridiculous approvals process blocks good apps and fails to block shovelware from flooding the platform I think people have plenty of reasons to complain it’s not working well.

For the most part Apple is in a bind of their creation here. They don’t want to surrender the cut of money they get from the App Store so they’re overly permissive about exploitative casino games and scams as long as they have in-app purchases. But they DO want to have standards, so they enforce standards on the books somewhat arbitrarily and it ends up falling on normal apps that just have some kind of functionality that hits an unknown third rail.

And even worse, there is an informal two-tiered system where companies like Meta and Amazon and Netflix can almost flagrantly violate App Store policies and mostly get away with it because of high demand for keeping the app in the store and because they have legal teams that will sue.

It would be better if they had an actual two-tiered system where developers with a track record of being good (defined however) can get a non-transferable “hunting license” to fast track approval and get more sensitive API privileges. But they’ll never do that either, because companies like Meta absolutely would not earn the privileges but demand them anyway.