Anyone who’s anyone in the world of mobile technology has either experienced the Apple Review Process as a developer or as a consumer and both experiences are equally as frustrating. From a developers perspective you need to get your app just perfect, because if there is one single solitary bug when it hits the App Store you are looking at a 5-7 day turn around (minimum) to get a fix in place (assuming the fix can be developed immediately). Now while that is a normal amount of bureaucracy for a large business, a small business like ours, which drives a large number of application downloads for Apple is left out in the wind per say. Our customers require our applications to stay relevant all the time, which means that our development cycles are nearly the same length as the review processes and in some cases shorter.

From the consumer perspective let’s say you’ve been using an application for several months, Flashlight 1.0 and Flashlight 2.0 comes out, you download it immediately….whoops there is a bug because I am using 4.1 on a 3G phone….how does the developer fix this??? The answer is technically simple and practically complex; we develop the fix in one hour (quite often fixes take about this amount of time), we submit to apple, wait a week and then get rejected because we misspelled something during the submittal process (yes it is this complex in execution). Finally, the bug fix goes out and the customer is disgruntled and decides to use another app.

In my opinion there is nothing technically wrong with what Apple is doing, however I would perhaps implement a “Karma” type system where you build up good “Karma” and that enables you to skip the review process or have an offset process. What Apple is most concerned about is UI adherence to standards and basically not saying “Android” anywhere in your App. Outside of that they are “good to go”, so let Developers that have proven themselves go about there business until someone complains. Google has addressed this issue on Android by allowing anyone to submit and simply developing smart filters to avoid flooding, etc.

Simply put, apps would be better without the constant back and forth with Apple.