Ex-Apple App Store reviewer gives insight on what it's like "sitting there looking at things that may or may not be d*cks all day long"

An ex-Apple employee that spent his time sifting through iOS App Store submissions talked a bit about what life was like at Apple in an interview. Mike Lee has, if nothing else, an interesting experience to relay.

People have this idea that there are 100 people in India doing app reviews. It's just people in a building at Apple, and like every other part of Apple, they can't get enough really good people. Apple will not compromise the quality of its teams to fill it in. I promise you its a lot smaller than you imagine. ... It's a very serious problem, trying to filter out things that no one is there to see. Somebody has to sit there and filter out all those d*cks. You can't let all those d*cks get through. You have to err way on the side of safety. You have to have people sitting there looking at things that may or may not be d*cks all day long. Apple refuses to farm stuff out to massive groups of people. They insist on having actual smart, educated, well-trained people doing the job. So that means they have to have some of their actual employees sifting through a pile of d*cks. ... The only way to deal with it is to set the bar so far away from d*cks so that even a picture of a cucumber gets blocked by accident. Because if you don't, you have people spending hours and hours of conversation on whether something is a pubic hair. It's a huge waste of time.

App reviewers have tended to be demonized by developers that have been denied or pulled from the App Store, but cast in this light, it's easy to sympathize with their situation; after going through a giant pile of penises, Mike Lee admits that their team "may accidentally toss out the gem".

Source: BusinessInsider

Simon Sage

Editor-at-very-large at Mobile Nations, gamer, giant.