We are now involved with multiple app stores due to Android and iOS versions of the app. Most of them perform some kind of review process. I understand the desire to do a review as it, to some extent, helps eliminate some of the app abuse *

Of all the ones who do app review, Apple does it the best. Yes, it takes them awhile but they have very specific guidelines and they test specifically for those guidelines. While Apple will report back if they discover a crashing issue or something that doesn’t work at all, short of making sure it adheres to the guidelines, Apple doesn’t tell us about “broken features.” Apple is looking primarily for things that could be bad for the customers.

We distribute through some other companies that like to “test the functionality” of our apps. They pretend they are a customer and report back “bugs” and opinions about how the app should function, rejecting the app and telling us to fix these issues before submitting again. Except these companies are not our customers and they have spent little time understanding how the product should work. What they think is a bug without really spending time with it is exactly how it is supposed to work.

I don’t need an app store to tell me how to design my products. That’s my job and my customer’s job to tell me when I’ve succeeded and failed.

But rather than pass it through testing and report that they found something they weren’t certain about and wanted to bring it to my attention, I get an email proclaiming that our app failed, resubmit if you want to try getting it through again. Even more insulting is that we have six versions of powerOne, all of which function off the exact same code base. A failure in one has to be a failure in all of them. Except they only ever reject one, and if they reject more than one it is for completely different reasons.

Frankly, reviews this way are insulting and their email rejections are pretentious. I wish they would all stick to what they are good at: making sure the apps adhere to security and safety concerns. Particularly on Android, this is a big enough problem as it is.

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* Don’t kid yourself. Most of the review processes are security theater. A nasty developer could easily thwart any of these review processes and not even break a sweat trying.