[heavyset_go]

Apple takes 30% of all sales and yet can't even hire skilled quality assurance workers to run the approval process for their App Store?

There needs to be real competition in the mobile app distribution space because this is absurd.

[ehsankia]

I don't think the problem here is with the QA workers. This is clearly a bug in the underlying internal test framework, which the QA workers have very little info about. And the likelihood of a given worker seeing enough of these errors for them to realize it's an issue with the system and not the app is fairly low.

The real issue is that the engineering team who maintains the internal app checking system 1. needs to have infrastructure to detect abnormal amount of a given error and 2. need to notify the QA team so the QA team can communicate it with the devs, rather than just blaming the apps.

[ethbro]

You'd think people would look at the initial healthcare.gov mess and make some conclusions.

One of which should maybe be "Don't strictly isolate teams, with unowned space between their output and the next team's input, and no method by which post-delivery failure reflects back on them."

[_qulr]

Apple said they review 100,000 apps per week.

I don't think anyone can do that sanely at scale.

Which is why nobody should try.

[heavyset_go]

1,000 - 2,000 dedicated quality assurances workers could review between 1 to 2.5 app per hour each week. Adding more personnel cuts this number down drastically.

It certainly can be done. Besides, this is a problem Apple has decided it can handle, since it decided that its customers can't benefit from competition between app stores with different approval processes.

[sjwright]

In my opinion, legitimate competition between App Stores would make the iPhone strictly worse for myself and for everyone I know that owns an iOS device. For me, the mandatory app review process is the big differentiator between the iPhone and Android and is the main reason why I have not switched.

[_qulr]

> 1,000 - 2,000 dedicated quality assurances workers could review between 1 to 2.5 app per hour each week.

Are those people even out there and available?

I mean, maybe there are right now because of Great Depression II, but were they available from 2008 to 2019?

As a company, Apple is generally against remote work, with only grudging exceptions, so that's another issue in hiring.

[com2kid]

Microsoft used to have far more manual testers than that.

2000 testers isn't unreasonable.

[heavyset_go]

> Are those people even out there and available?

There are over 4 million of software engineers in the United States alone, and I'd wager that many of them are capable of doing QA. Apple is a company that is able to pay competitive wages for their talent.

[_qulr]

I'm a software engineer, and I would never want this job. It's got to be incredibly boring and tedious.

Most reviews are for minor app updates. "Bug fixes and performance improvements." Ho hum. Twitter and many other companies release app updates every week, just because they can.

I suspect the job of app reviewer has a pretty high turnover.

[heavyset_go]

> I'm a software engineer, and I would never want this job. It's got to be incredibly boring and tedious.

That's cool, but testing roles exist throughout the industry and some people choose QA as a career.

I wouldn't want to be an IT support specialist, it sounds like a boring job to me, but that doesn't mean that there aren't a million career support specialists employed by trillion dollar companies like Apple.

I'm sure people would line up to be paid well to work on Apple's QA even if you wouldn't.

[wila]

But, you're a software developer. As a developer testing isn't the exciting part of your work.

I'm also a dev and have had the chance to work with top notch QA testers. A good QA engineer is a blessing. Unfortunately that is not what an apple app reviewer does. Their work is much more boring.

[stjohnswarts]

Some software engineers are in it for the pay. If you offer them a relatively easy (even if repetitive) job for the same pay, they will jump on it. You can't judge these types of thing based on your personal preferences, you have to take a step back and look back at all the people you knew in college, I think you'll remember some who would be perfectly fine with this line of work.

[sjwright]

As a consumer, I'd rather Apple sometimes do a bad job and sometimes piss off developers than do nothing. I'm certainly not saying that Apple is doing a good job, but for most end users, the alternative is strictly worse.