Apple’s app application process has always drawn flak from the media and customers. If you didn’t know, the people behind the app review process are the people who test and check if a new app from a developer does what it says it does. Basically, they’re the people responsible for making sure that the Apple app store is free from bad or exceedingly crappy apps. Mike Lee, a former senior engineer at Apple who worked on the company’s Worldwide Developer Relations team shared his experience in an interview down by Business Insider. He reveals that the core team that works behind the app review process is extremely small, due to the requirements of Apple’s upper management on the quality, not the quantity, of its team members. What really surprises us though is the main reason why Apple takes such a rigid stance on (excuse the pun) anything that may be even slightly pornographic – male genitalia. Or more specifically, hundreds and hundreds of apps that depict male genitalia. We’ll let Mike Lee explain it:
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.
Source: Business Insider