It's really not that hard. At the end of the day it's just a human making quick decisions hundreds of times a day.
I've had more than my share of rejected updates that get approved after a re-submission with no change.
> At the end of the day it's just a human making quick decisions hundreds of times a day.
My company had a version of our communications app in the app store for several years. We decided to sell private-branded versions for some customers where the only differences were the color palette and logo shown on the login screen.
For the app versions we created for customers, one was approved on first review, another required a couple months of back-and-forth with the reviewer, and the third never got approved.
You and I know, but the great majority of the people in the world do not.
And, of course, we only see the cases where the scam app gets through. The success rate for these scams might be pretty low, but from our perspective we wouldn't know.
> You and I know, but the great majority of the people in the world do not.
It's literally an app reviewer's job to know that. Having random people on the street reviewing apps would not be very useful. Although sadly, that may be close to the truth:
> You and I know, but the great majority of the people in the world do not.
Relevance? When there is already an app called LastPass published by LogMeIn with millions of downloads, clearly you don't approve an app called LastPass published by a "Parvati Patel"
I worked on issues similar to this during my time at Apple, but from the search and discovery side of things. You would have bands in Apple Music name themselves genres like "Rock and Roll" or and all sorts of shenanigans.
We’ll see that’s the rub. Isn’t it? Should someone be able to create a band called Meditation Playlist? Is it fraud? Is it just unethical? Is it neither? It requires human judgment where that line is.
> The responsibility for "fixing" it or whatever is on the platform.
I agree! It made for interesting search problems to solve for sure.
What are your thoughts on the LassPass app? If they were phishing for LastPass credentials, that's going to be a problem, but if they had a real service then I'm not sure.
This has been an ongoing issue, albeit not with examples this egregious. If there's one thing I hope the DMA provides, it's a compelling case to Apple to more carefully review and reject scams worldwide. Every time an app like this slips through, it makes the platform worse. While some failures are expected, I really want Apple to do better than to let a direct impersonation of a password manager through.
i'm not sure i understand you. you're saying third party app stores will incentivise apple to improve their quality control to better differentiate them from competing app stores?
Yeah, I mean, that's what I would hope? Especially if a competing app store were to surface with "better" standards for this. As someone residing in the USA, I don't directly benefit from the DMA, but I would sure like to have the App Store improve.
