Is Apple’s App Store quality control too relaxed?
Yeah, relaxed. Not strict. While many would argue that Apple is too strict and controlling with their app store, I sometimes wonder the exact opposite. Just now I was looking through the App Store for any apps that I could write about on the site, and one that caught my attention promised live TV from around the world. The app, World TV Pro HD, is only $1, so I bought it. In hindsight I should have read the comments, as I had the exact same problem as every single commenter in the Norwegian app store has: the app won’t start. At all. Closing all apps, freeing RAM or even restarting the iPad does nothing, and the app crashes within 2 seconds.
I don’t pretend to know Apple’s quality control routines when they approve apps, but you’d think that they would at least run it once on each of the devices it can run on- especially the newer ones. I know they have declined apps in the past for not running well on older devices (even though the app has been submitted as working on them) so somewhere along the lone someone has to try it out. Unfortunately though this isn’t the first app I’ve seen with this issue in the App Store, and it won’t be the last. Some apps simply refuse to ever start, sometimes after updates and sometimes right off the bat. Other apps have such serious memory leakage (using too much RAM without “letting it go” when you close the app) issues that if I’d been Apple I would have banned the developers from the App Store until it was fixed. We Rule Deluxe is one such example, and it’s probably one of the worst coded apps in history- over one year in and it still acts like an early alpha release.
I sincerely hope that Apple addresses this issue more in the future and don’t allow developers to release just anything. While any app has to grow from a starting point, that starting point has to actually work at all. It’s better to do like e.g. ReplayNote and release an app with few features, all of which work perfectly, than release an app that has many features that doesn’t work.
