Out of curiosity, I went through posts the other day and counted the number of App Review complaints in a single day. I found 17, but it seemed like that was a slow day with numerous actual technical posts.
I just repeated the exercise and found 32. I'm not sure about my methodology at the edge. The forum doesn't have real, absolute timestamps. A timestamp of "23h" is definitely in range, but I'm not sure about "1d". And the forum list is limited to 10 pages. So the actual 24-hour count number this morning could be more or less than 32.
I'm probably not going to repeat the exercise. I'll just assume the average is 24 per day and leave it at that. I'm not claiming this is a good thing or a bad thing. I simply find it morbidly fascinating.
Qualitatively, the results are equally creepy. The posts seem to follow a template. They virtually always feature:
- A call for input to ask if anyone else has ever experienced anything similar, as if the past 8 months haven't happened. But perhaps this is just the modern approach - speak your truth first, read or listen to others later, if at all.
- A request for guidance from other developers for escalation strategies.
- A plea to the Apple gods for intervention or confirmation of properly queued status.
Engagement seems unproductive.
More concerning for other developers is a common practice of automatically requesting an expedited review. Not every post includes this, but virtually every post that involves a rejection says that a subsequent submission was expedited. I don't think I've ever requested an expedited review. It doesn't sound like a good idea in this age of AI-supported App Review. If there's a rejection model in training, it seems like expedited review status would be a significant input.
I noticed a recent attempt to bump some Apple posts pointing to App Review tips. I'm not sure such bumps are effective. For one thing, they're already on page 9. Who's looking at page 9 other than me? It would be better if they were truly pinned following common practice in other forums. And obviously none of these posters are reading any previous posts before making their own. They sometimes do some after-the-fact forum research and add a few "me too" replies.
On a more humourous note, it's telling that there is an assumption in this community that people recognize rejection reasons by App Review Guideline paragraph number. I'm starting to learn those myself from reading these posts. That's a clear signal to change my own behaviour, which is ultimately all I can do.
My plea to the Apple gods would involve some support for that endeavour in the form of forum updates to 1) better serve these hapless developers and 2) allow other developers to ignore them. For example, the Apple Support Community, apparently based on the same back-end discussion forum engine, has the ability to allow users to subscribe to specific communities. I don't see any way to do that here. I would sure like to be able to exclude both "App Store Distribution & Marketing" and "App Review" from any such subscription list. (And maybe SwiftUI too. 😄 )
I have other suggestions regarding comments, notifications, and update indications. But the current poor state of forums would overwhelm any such minor improvements.
