I hope this is not off-topic, but I think I have found a good explanation for this nonsense of rejections.
When I heard about the first rejections, I just thought that Apple was setting the bar pretty high. But then I saw that fart apps where approved by the dozen, and very complex apps were rejected for ridiculous reasons, so that did not explain the rejections. Then I saw rejections for things like a bad word in a tweeter feed. So I thought that maybe Apple is just hiring incompetent minimum wage reviewers. But then I started to see rejections where the reviewer did his best to find objectionable content, like expressly searching for an objectionable book, in a very well done application.
That’s when it struck me. I believe that the culprit is that Apple uses
Management By Objectives . To make it short, while maybe good in theory, it’s a method where employees are evaluated against arbitrary criteria, that in reality don’t measure the real quality of the employee’s work and have pretty random outcomes. As the Wikipedia article says, this method often leads to unethical behavior from employees in order to reach their objectives. I have been subjected to such a method until I quit my job recently and I have seen the disastrous results first hand.
So how does MBO work? Let’s take a well known example. My ex worked in a call center. The only objective they had to reach was to be below a certain arbitrary average duration of customer calls. The actual quality of the support didn’t matter. So what happens when a CSR was above the average? He would make fake excuses to finish calls that would apparently take a long time: “sorry, can’t hear you”,”call back when you have the printer serial number”, “reboot and call back”… whatever the problem really was.
So my point is, I believe Apple rates reviewers on average review time. And since finding any defect is ground to reject an app, some reviewers will do whatever they need to find any rejection reason as quickly as possible. This would also explain why sometimes app that are quick to review are not rejected for the same ridiculous reasons as well done but complex ones are.
But then, you are going to tell me, why don’t they also blanket approve applications? I believe there must be a two stage review or an approval report written, that would explain why sometimes apps are approved only many days after reviewer usage. And I guess there is also a huge risk if an app is later found to be unsuitable, like the baby shaker thing.
