May 1, 2024

Former Apple Engineer Reveals the Hardships of Being an App Reviewer

Posted July 3, 2012 at 5:59pm by iClarified · 15900 views
Mike Lee, a former senior engineer at Apple who was part of the Worldwide Developer Relations team, says being an app reviewer is lousy work in an interview with Business Insider.

"People have this idea that there are 100 people in India doing app reviews," Lee tells Business Insider. "It's just people in a building at Apple, and like every other part of Apple, they can't get enough really good people. Apple will not compromise the quality of its teams to fill it in. I promise you its a lot smaller than you imagine."

Lee says that reviewers have got to go through a ton of garbage including numerous app submissions featuring male genitalia.

"It's a very serious problem, trying to filter out things that no one is there to see. Somebody has to sit there and filter out all those d*cks. You can't let all those d*cks get through. You have to err way on the side of safety. You have to have people sitting there looking at things that may or may not be d*cks all day long. Apple refuses to farm stuff out to massive groups of people. They insist on having actual smart, educated, well-trained people doing the job. So that means they have to have some of their actual employees sifting through a pile of d*cks."

According to Lee, this is why Apple's censorship policy is so strict. It's to expedite the review process.

"The only way to deal with it is to set the bar so far away from d*cks so that even a picture of a cucumber gets blocked by accident," he says. "Because if you don't, you have people spending hours and hours of conversation on whether something is a pubic hair. It's a huge waste of time."

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