Apple recently called us about one of our titles about inappropriate content.
With this rare opportunity, the man was drilled for insight on how this whole ‘approval’ thing works.
Apparently, content, technical and featuring are all separate departments who don’t even talk to each other (possibly aren’t in the same building, even). This is probably to prevent ‘brown paper bagging’.
When an app is developer rejected, it gets thrown back in the queue. Everything is in queues (so there’s no prioritizing of fart apps over The Sims).
That’s it… We all suspected that might be how it works, but until now I hadn’t read anywhere that actually confirmed it. So, if your app crashes 6 times in a row while they’re trying to find inappropriate content, they don’t care. If you flash a wang on screen during the tech phase, it probably doesn’t matter
I can’t help but wonder if there’s a way to exploit this to get the worst, goatse-bomb, crashtastic app possible into the store AND get it featured. Anyone up for a challenge? :twisted:
BTW/FYI, A friend of mine on the publishing side who had metrics tracking in his game said that the total time Apple played it was around 20 minutes. That doesn’t seem like anywhere near enough time to find any deeper issues. I semi-jokingly asked why not just exploit the hell out of that fact and release totally buggy and Xrated crap and his response was that Apple has a hair-trigger on pulling apps off the store.
the hair trigger though is only pulled it if goes totally wrong or is false advertised.
apple won’t pull bugged apps, otherwise half of EAs auto crash games would have been removed (sim city was very ugly up to the point where it corrupted savegame data).
That kind of stuff is handled by the refunds.
If you potentially lose 30% per refund, you stop offering bug crap automatically
