[blunte]

There is some responsibility as gatekeeper of applications (especially if you make an effort to create a walled garden) to ensure some level of quality. And as this article points out, Apple obviously made little or no effort (or is very stupid? I doubt that.)

Consider the potential number of new apps per day to an app store. Now imagine that each app requires 10-60 minutes of a halfway intelligent human's time to review. That's not such a huge staff required, especially compared to the revenue of said app store.

Or let's be generous and reduce the responsibility of app stores to just police the top 20 or 50 apps. If, daily or weekly, the top 20 apps were reviewed for quality, that would obviously require a very small staff... and it would prevent situations like this.

Ultimately, situations like this will result in class action lawsuits (like the one Amazon dealt with that resulted in them refunding a lot of childrens' in-app purchases). Perhaps what's happening is that companies decide it's just easier (organizationally) to handle legal problems than to manage business better. After all, final settlements tend to be fractions of actual costs to consumers.

[CM30]

I'm more wondering whether Apple and Google's review processes might make them unable to be protected by safe harbour laws. I mean, there was a case where a forum type site got in trouble because members had posted illegal content and the moderation team had apparently approved every submission manually.

So I'm almost wondering whether at one point, we might either see a copyright holder sue Apple (or Google given Google Play is even worse here) for allowing infringing apps or the authorities treat them as complicit in fraud.

[int_19h]

> Consider the potential number of new apps per day to an app store. Now imagine that each app requires 10-60 minutes of a halfway intelligent human's time to review. That's not such a huge staff required, especially compared to the revenue of said app store.

I'm not sure this adds up. By my counting, taking the total number of apps currently in the store, it would add up to something like 700 apps/day - which is reasonable. But as I understand, they review submissions rather than apps (or at least they should, for this process to make any sense) - which means that new versions of the same app also need to be reviewed, and then the same version might get reviewed multiple times if it gets rejected. Given the update frequency for a typical mobile app, this all would add up really quickly.

Could they still afford it? I bet. But it would be a significant expense.

[codedokode]

Developers can deceive reviewers, for example by making app to check whether it is in review stage and behaving differently.

I think a better idea would be improving different permission dialogs UI and telling users to think before granting access to anything. Still it won't help against fake apps using same name as popular apps to get into search results.