[valuearb]

Apple is rigorous (I've been rejected close to 20 times). But app review is also hard, especially when there is a flood of new app submissions every week, day and hour. Validating that an app does what it says it does isn't really what App Review is for. Most of my rejections were for how I described a feature, not how a feature worked.

Also there are ways to defeat App Review. Geo-fencing, time-boxing, etc so your illegal code never runs during review.

[notadoc]

Shouldn't it be a giant red flag to a reviewer when the app is focused on an entirely fictional premise?

If the app was claiming to grow a dinosaur in your backyard after you pay $400/mo would it be treated any different?

[bartread]

> If the app was claiming to grow a dinosaur in your backyard after you pay $400/mo would it be treated any different?

Honestly, that already sounds like a significantly better app than “Mobile protection :Clean & Security VPN”.

I do agree though. It's quite odd that something as clearly bad and misleading as this could get past the review stage even assuming timeboxed code and so forth. That would imply that it would have to do something both useful and congruent with its description during the review process, and presumably not be full of spelling mistakes and badly described features. That seems unlikely.

[megablast]

>Honestly, that already sounds like a significantly better app than “Mobile protection :Clean & Security VPN”.

They are both scam apps, that take your money and give you nothing, so not sure how that is any better?

[mastax]

The dinosaur app doesn't hijack your internet traffic or (presumably) sell your contacts.

[bartread]

Yet again I learn the lesson that wry humour does not work on the internet.

[tyingq]

Agreed. Also, all the obvious typos, unneeded permissions, and the high in app purchase price seem like they should have been flags to dig deeper.

Unless they somehow hid all of this, it seems to point to a weakness in the app review process.

[valuearb]

Yes it should be. But it might not be that easy. App reviewers aren't developers, sometimes they don't know what's possible or not. And they review lots of apps, sometimes they might not apply the rules correctly.

But the bigger problem is that you can write conditional code that doesn't run during review. So the skanky things you do might not be caught, see Uber's geofencing of cupertino when they tried to fingerprint phones to catch account scammers.

Pretty sure the marketing text can't be changed post-review, so again that should have at least been caught.

[wyldfire]

> But it might not be that easy. App reviewers aren't developers, sometimes they don't know what's possible or not. And they review lots of apps, sometimes they might not apply the rules correctly.

Shrug, it's Apple's walled garden and Apple's reviewers. They are free to hire different people or set different app review policies.

Really -- there's vastly more honest people than dishonest, so outrage over issues like this haven't arrived (yet), otherwise Apple would do a deeper review.

[bananaboy]

Are they really that rigorous? We just submitted our first game to the app store and they bounced us for two reasons, which were both because they hadn't seemed to pay attention to the game.

We have some text on a button that says "PACK 2 / EARN 50 STARS / OR BUY $1.49" (over three lines) which I thought was pretty clear: earn 50 stars in game to get the pack or use real money (the game teaches you about earning stars as you play) . They assumed that clicking on the button and spending real money would GIVE the player 50 stars so I suspect they didn't play the game at all and just went straight to the IAP screen.

The second thing they said was that there was no restore purchases button (which is a requirement if you have IAPs). Well, there is a restore purchases button in the credits screen, they just didn't explore the user interface (but somehow they found the IAP screen).

So they seem to do a very cursory look at submissions.