MAYBE operating systems shouldn't have gatekeepers which can deny access to billions of customers for any and no reason at all. Apple and Google are WELL past due for regulation in this space. The fact that we cannot download and install software from the internet onto our phones JUST like we can do with our computers is a symbol of our inept and ineffective politicians.
And before someone says "well akshully you can technically do it on Android," Google has been working tirelessly to make it as onerous as possible for both developers and customers. For example, users need to separately authorise each app (browser, files manager, alternative store, etc) to install an APK from outside the Play Store. Google also does background scans using "Play Protect" which will periodically delete apps Google doesn't approve of. This happened to me with SmartTubeNext. I have a dozen other ways Google ensures users are discouraged from stepping outside the Play Store.
Security at its core comes down to trusting the supply chain that provides the software that runs on your hardware. There are many alternative secure supply chain models, but ultimately users often are incapable of making great choices on what is trustworthy. It does generally make sense that the OS vendor needs to play a key part in helping ensure trusted parties are involved in the supply chain.
Comparing phones to PCs isn't a great comparison because PCs don't have a great track record and the amount of personal data and ease of installing lots of apps is quite different. Of course the current arrangement is far from perfect, but acknowledging the problems it's trying to solve is an important step towards trying to find a solution that is better.
And what should we do about apps' getting hacked, sending out malicious updates that get auto-updated and thereby infecting tens of millions or billions of phones simultaneously?
I'm not saying we have the perfect system but anything that slants the system towards "easier downloads" or "less gatekeeping" brings large, obvious risks. I don't see how regulation would address them.
I wonder if people would be happy replacing the "Google approves developers" system with a "government requires your ID and address on file so you can be held liable for your apps" system. I suspect not.
We could force Google to operate its app review service independently. Users could use it and pay for it, or alternatives. Currently Google forces everyone to use their own mediocre service and pay for it without knowing exactly where and how much you pay.
How about treating people like adults for a start? How about starting public awareness campaigns about proper digital hygiene. Not everything has to be nanny state garbage.
Your complaint about Android .apk install is... similar to unsigned software installs on Windows in some cases (not a great argument, I know, but the same as the vast majority of users would be used to).
As for SmartTube, their keys were compromised. Inconvenient, but it wasn't about hostility to self-installed applications.
Key compromise sucks and is hard to protect against. That said the Apple/Google app stores are also full of scams where people lose a lot of real money:
In the last month, I had to go through the review process twice, and twice I needed to contact them personally after waiting for 1 week of waiting. It did however helped, after every human contact I was reviewed within a few hours.
I got this explanation from them...
> We are currently experiencing a higher-than-normal amount of inquiries and have been unable to respond in the time frame that we would prefer. During these periods of high volume, the app review time will take longer than average, and we cannot currently provide a concrete timeline for when your specific app(s) will be finished with the process
Team effort, but thank you!! I've just taken the next month and a half off to work on things full time. I'm excited!
The next update won't be huge, (Google required us to make all screens 'edge to edge'[0], which took up most of my time last month). I'm hoping for some solid improvements now that's out the way, once the release pipeline has returned to normal.
Feel free to get in touch if you fancy contributing.
If you can get your agent of choice to run up the app in an emulator and navigate the whole thing taking screenshots then tasks like edge-to-edge can be pretty hands off.
The way I did it was to firstly get accessibility identifiers on everything. Then have it record everything I do on an emulator to navigate the entire app. Then left it for a while to work out how to actually use the app via the emulator. Once you have this sort of baseline. A lot of changes are really quite pleasant. I often ask for an HTML gallery of screenshots covering a few device sizes as the step before I bother running it on a device myself.
We use Roborazzi[0], which is an excellent screenshot library, but:
* We target minSdk 24
* We're still using XML views
* We target a large variety of form factors
* We have a lot of screens, and these have a lot of configuration options.
I really wish it was "point an agent at it, and walk away", but many screens ended up being hours of iteration with Fable driving my phone/an emulator to produce an acceptable outcome.
Given that my Pixel 9 Pro has system screens which are still broken under edge to edge, it's not an easy change, and takes up time which could have been going towards feature development.
Strong argument in favor of web vs native apps. If you need bluetooth on iOS checkout the web bluetooth iOS safari extension i've been working on recently: https://beacio.com
Yes, a truly Open Web is the solution that we need. It already works everywhere with a single codebase, and is more secure and private than native apps.
But Apple prevents that by forcing all browsers to use terrible WebKit on iOS.
Some reviews are clearly automated, some get a light human review, and some involve a human really looking hard. New apps seem to get a more rigorous human review for their first 2-4 submissions. Or at least humans looking over automated test screenshots etc. One reviewer apparently only looked at screenshots because they missed something that would be blindingly obvious on the prior screen if they did it themselves.
The explosion in LLM app development has clearly created a bottleneck at the human review steps. Not only delays but much more “dumb” rejections from likely over-stressed humans.
Yeap latest CoMaps update took ~16 days to review (the longest wait for us so far) and two support tickets (submitted first after ~9 days and got "we have expedited it", 5 days later still in review, so submitted one more ticket).
Before that we had a hotfix update (a very small change) and still it took longer than a week and a support ticket (after which it had been approved in a day)...
The Google Play review process has been slower and more painful than the App Store review process for 5+ years at this point. At least you get to communicate with real people at Apple; it’s all bot-driven with Google.
Part of the value of F-Droid is the curated distribution model that hopefully catches the worst behaving developers that think they have a god given right to your data though.
We push updates for our app pretty frequently and they've been passing review in an average time of 1 hour (around 7 updates in the last 60 days). Hope it stays that way.
Not sure how it works behind the scene, but our app (present on the store since 2018) is taking a couple hours at best with Google, and usually less than 24h with Apple.
Very much likely an automated triage based on code change or complexity.
I believe the App Store has switched to automated reviews, at least for updates. I've had my app updates approved in <1h on a regular basis starting this summer.
From what I was able to see from the outside, App Store has had semi-automated reviews for updates in basically forever (+ some random spot checks), presumably based on some introspection that only triggers a human review if a new system API was used.
Everyone that ingests code is seeing an order of magnitude more of it thanks to LLMs, even existing apps are producing more updates. It's the same sort of thing github keeps failing to keep up with.
Apple's App Review has also been slipping over the past few months. I have multiple apps that have taken days, up to a week to be approved.
What's most galling is that if you use CapacitorJS or similar you can ship app updates instantly to your users but if you write native first-class OS citizen apps you are penalized.
There is nothing quite so annoying as having a fix for a bug people are running into and have zero control over when it will get out to them.
On the flip side, googles release infra provides much more functionality for apps that already has scale. I wish apple were more production oriented too.
For all the complaining about Apple's store, the Play Store has always been worse imo. You can't even release an app without first doing a beta test with at least a dozen people.
> You can't even release an app without first doing a beta test with at least a dozen people.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you are saying here but less than a month ago I released a brand new app with no beta period, direct to production (white labeled app, which is why I didn't need a beta)
For new accounts yes, for older accounts it's much faster in my experience.
Apple has it's own issues, they often just answer with a random question so they can kick the review down the line. "Are you sure this is your pricing?" "Can you confifrm you have not selected that country" and then you have to wait another 2 days.
TFA is a post from an established developer and showing a screenshot for the submission of an update to a longstanding app (Conversations XMPP chat client).
And before someone says "well akshully you can technically do it on Android," Google has been working tirelessly to make it as onerous as possible for both developers and customers. For example, users need to separately authorise each app (browser, files manager, alternative store, etc) to install an APK from outside the Play Store. Google also does background scans using "Play Protect" which will periodically delete apps Google doesn't approve of. This happened to me with SmartTubeNext. I have a dozen other ways Google ensures users are discouraged from stepping outside the Play Store.
But Apple prevents that by forcing all browsers to use terrible WebKit on iOS.
Endless more information on all of this at
https://infrequently.org/series/browser-choice-must-matter/
https://open-web-advocacy.org
Comparing phones to PCs isn't a great comparison because PCs don't have a great track record and the amount of personal data and ease of installing lots of apps is quite different. Of course the current arrangement is far from perfect, but acknowledging the problems it's trying to solve is an important step towards trying to find a solution that is better.
I imagine nearly all the security review is automated scans, and not the source of the delays.
I'm not saying we have the perfect system but anything that slants the system towards "easier downloads" or "less gatekeeping" brings large, obvious risks. I don't see how regulation would address them.
As for SmartTube, their keys were compromised. Inconvenient, but it wasn't about hostility to self-installed applications.
Key compromise sucks and is hard to protect against. That said the Apple/Google app stores are also full of scams where people lose a lot of real money:
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/07/27/apple-app-store-fake-bi...
And yes, they also have apps besides games on their stores, and support external keyboards and mices.
Their review process is advocated as usually within 24 hours (and heavily advertised by Apple as such, see https://developer.apple.com/distribute/app-review/) and it is taking now much longer.
In the last month, I had to go through the review process twice, and twice I needed to contact them personally after waiting for 1 week of waiting. It did however helped, after every human contact I was reviewed within a few hours.
I got this explanation from them...
> We are currently experiencing a higher-than-normal amount of inquiries and have been unable to respond in the time frame that we would prefer. During these periods of high volume, the app review time will take longer than average, and we cannot currently provide a concrete timeline for when your specific app(s) will be finished with the process
I'm guessing, AI slots invading the store.
The next update won't be huge, (Google required us to make all screens 'edge to edge'[0], which took up most of my time last month). I'm hoping for some solid improvements now that's out the way, once the release pipeline has returned to normal.
Feel free to get in touch if you fancy contributing.
[0] https://developer.android.com/develop/ui/views/layout/edge-t...
The way I did it was to firstly get accessibility identifiers on everything. Then have it record everything I do on an emulator to navigate the entire app. Then left it for a while to work out how to actually use the app via the emulator. Once you have this sort of baseline. A lot of changes are really quite pleasant. I often ask for an HTML gallery of screenshots covering a few device sizes as the step before I bother running it on a device myself.
* We target minSdk 24
* We're still using XML views
* We target a large variety of form factors
* We have a lot of screens, and these have a lot of configuration options.
I really wish it was "point an agent at it, and walk away", but many screens ended up being hours of iteration with Fable driving my phone/an emulator to produce an acceptable outcome.
Given that my Pixel 9 Pro has system screens which are still broken under edge to edge, it's not an easy change, and takes up time which could have been going towards feature development.
[0] https://github.com/takahirom/roborazzi/
Endless more information on all of this at
https://infrequently.org/series/browser-choice-must-matter/
https://open-web-advocacy.org
The explosion in LLM app development has clearly created a bottleneck at the human review steps. Not only delays but much more “dumb” rejections from likely over-stressed humans.
Before that we had a hotfix update (a very small change) and still it took longer than a week and a support ticket (after which it had been approved in a day)...
Was only 48-72 hours until this year, where it randomly jumped to 2 weeks or longer like it still is.
It's really frustrating, and makes it very difficult to develop with, let alone reliably release features across platforms.
Google Play is regularly slower now than App Store Connect, which never used to be the case
Very much likely an automated triage based on code change or complexity.
What's most galling is that if you use CapacitorJS or similar you can ship app updates instantly to your users but if you write native first-class OS citizen apps you are penalized.
There is nothing quite so annoying as having a fix for a bug people are running into and have zero control over when it will get out to them.
On the flip side, googles release infra provides much more functionality for apps that already has scale. I wish apple were more production oriented too.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you are saying here but less than a month ago I released a brand new app with no beta period, direct to production (white labeled app, which is why I didn't need a beta)
Apple has it's own issues, they often just answer with a random question so they can kick the review down the line. "Are you sure this is your pricing?" "Can you confifrm you have not selected that country" and then you have to wait another 2 days.