Apple hires 500 people to manually check every application in the App Store

A hearing has taken place on one of Apple's lawsuits against Epic, and now we are awaiting the verdict

Meanwhile, Apple's 325-page legal position has been made public, and it has some extremely interesting details about how it worksOne of the largest and most important technology companies in the world.

The first impressive number is simply the number of developers who have subscribed to iOS, a platform that has been running for 14 yearsThere are "27 million registered iOS developers who have agreed to abide by the Developer Agreement," which means thatapproximately 0.33% of the world's population are iOS developers.

Obviously, this means a large number of applications, and "so Apple uses– indeed, for the first time – a thorough manual review of the application review process, in which theabout 500 Apple employees scattered around the world."machine review to determine if the app violates any App Store policies or useswhether it's private APIs, and the algorithm can also make judgments about copycat or fraudulent apps (e.g., reject a Fortnite clone called Fortcraft).

However, the human factor is very important becausealgorithms are fundamentally dumb: Apple gives the example of how a human will instantly recognize that a calculator app asking to use the camera is suspicious activity, while a machine verification process wouldn't necessarily notice. Therefore, each application is subject to human review.

Perhaps there is an opinion that the App Store mayget in anything, but this review process “results in the rejection of about 40% of submitted applications. In most cases, applications that have software glitches or bugs, or that may compromise the privacy or security of user data are rejected. To give some idea of ​​the scale of this process, Apple rejected more than 150,000 apps for privacy violations in 2020.

As a result, iOS is one of the mostsecure platforms for users, which is Apple's key selling point for its "indoor garden" approach. “As a result of App Review's efforts and Apple's subsequent processes, the number of malicious apps on iOS is significantly lower than on Android. In 2018, the iPhone platform accounted for only 0.85% of malware infections. For comparison, Android accounted for 47.15%, and Windows/PC – 35.82%.”

Source: 9to5mac

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