AI is turning Apple's app review process into a nightmare for synth developers

You can feel the entitlement across the room from the developer. They seem to be unable to conceive that outside of their bubble there can be a real case of AI spamming that same look and feel, even if they did it by heart.

Looking at his work, it's clearly modelled after Serum (which even the article describes as "a sort of Serum 2 for iOS") so I am not sure why they think this suddenly deserves a white glove service here.

The App Store is also flooded with Synth apps, so regardless of the UI being the trigger here, I would imagine the category itself has been flagged as spammy and now has a higher bar of entry.

If anything I would use this as an opportunity to reskin and try to stand out, they're giving you a blueprint of what will perform better on the algorithm if you avoid that look if you think about it.

Or just try an Alt Store.

Not sure if it’s because I have a good track record but I only had been rejected a couple of times and even then I just had to submit a screen recording of me playing with the app to make it pass the review process.

Maybe the "democratization" of it will bring in fresh ideas. Maybe not. But anyway basically no one will make any money or have any success off these vibe coded apps.

Some of them are good - generally by musicians or sound designers who couldn't code.

Many are utter trash, designed by developers who have barely any musical taste and simply told Claude to make some glitchy reverb pedal or groovebox. They use AI to write the copy for the app store and leave the UI as default (navy with fixed width headers, often looking like more like a spreadsheet than a synth). Sometimes trying to charge as much as $30 for it. It's a scourge but on the upside, most of them have now got their dopamine fix and moved onto something else.

Oh, so they are trying to do a soft bait and switch; where an app developer makes an app, splits its functionality, and sells both on the app store. They hope that someone buys the first app, which is missing basic functionality, not realizing they have to buy a second app to get the additional expected features. Like if you buy a video converter app that doesn't let you convert to an MP4 unless you buy a second "MP4 version" video converter app. Scummy behavior, glad Apple blocked it.

This is absurd.

If people want the editorialized 'safety' of an App Store, they can use it, that's fine, but there's no reason to stop people from buying apps for their phone from wherever they want.

I don't disagree with the critique of Apple's policies, but boy this made me roll my eyes.

Then all subsequent ones were rejected "Developer provided test account stopped working"

Logs show that the tester used the "delete my account" function..

As the only customer service available is an uncaring LLM, the only solution that worked was to keep the "Delete my account" button in the app, and make it a NOP on the server side.

"About 80% of the reviewers on my team were former Apple retail employees. Many were Geniuses, the people who fixed your phone at the store. The other 20% came from elsewhere. They came from bartending, tree trimming, and tech."

"When I was there, a new app got about 13 minutes. An update got about 6. Those 13 minutes cover every localization, every screen, and every purchase described above."

This is why app review is a joke, and why the App Store is full of crap and scams.

According to Shoemaker, Steve Jobs demanded that Apple review every app, but Jobs resigned from Apple only 2.5 years after the App Store opened. More than 15 years later, it's clear that the App Store has outgrown the expectations of the dying Jobs.

I suspect that Jobs would have changed and adapted if he had lived, but Tim Cook seemed content to cash in on the easy App Store revenue.