[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.

[Aeolun]

To be fair, software engineers are in the kind of luxurious position where we can actually say something like:

I don’t enjoy doing this job so I won’t do it.

I don’t think that’s true for the majority of people, who just happen to do a specific job because they’ve been trained for it and it pays the bills.

[fakedang]

Especially the fact that QA folks don't need to be software engineers or even be paid SWE wages.

[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.