At the same time, you can just send people APKs or publish to F-Droid.

Apple allows none of that. As a hobbyist I find Google to be much more reasonable, paying 25$ once vs 100$ a year for a dev account.

Getting my Apple dev account was such a horrible process, I had to talk to at least 6 people and it took months.

I'll just pay Cook's ransom, guess I have motivation to develop something new if only to justify the dev fee.

> At the same time, you can just send people APKs or publish to F-Droid.

That's not really an alternative as only a few nerds will jump through these hoops. The app is as good as dead if you are not in the stores.

It is an alternative. And it is infinitely superior than the situation on iOS where you are simply out of options if Apple does not approve. With Android it might be harder than being listed in the Play Store, but at least it is possible and there are massive communities who do so.

There are plenty of other stores with reasonable reach, such as Samsung, Huawei and Amazon's stores.

Of course not nearly as much, but discoverability in the Play Store is already a mess.

If you have a solid community users will download the app.

Hell, you can point them to a GitHub artifacts page.

At least it's an option.

"come over here, this side of the pasture is slighly less kafkaesque"

I think using Apple as the reference here is the wrong kind of baseline shift.

I may disagree with an Apple App Store policy or decision, but IME I've never found it kafkaesque. Google's really is a maze.

I recently had an app pulled from Google about a month after its latest update (the app has been in the store for years) b/c I hadn't checked some new privacy box in the UI. I received no warning prior to the take down or when I last submitted, and the take down message didn't even point me in the UI where I could check this box. After searching SO, I was able to track it down. Then the app was rejected for an unrelated reason that required an appeal. I appealed and they simply stated rejection again. I appealed again asking if they actually read the original appeal and received no response. A week or so later the app was back live - and I only knew because I checked.

I had an app taken down 5 years after the last update for a trademark violation in the store listing: a photo of a logo. The app was a logo identification app (basically). So that was utterly hilarious. I never fixed it. I lol’d so hard I didn’t even care.

Sound like a reasonable take down. You are using someone else's logo.

It was a screen shot of an app recognizing the logo, with their permission.

Ah I see, agreed then.

If just "slightly" is enough to make people move, there'd be more competitive pressure on Google to improve things, and for Apple to catch up or stay ahead. Don't estimate the power of competition.

Apple's app store policies are far more capricious, e.g. my company's e-commerce app was rejected because the splash screen displays a shopping cart with a Microsoft Surface in it. We've had many more problems fighting Apple's app store than Google's.

Google would just tell you that your app metadata does not comply with the Play Store terms of service and let you figure it out by trial and error.

I mean you say that, but having done about ~60 releases for the same app on both platforms over the last three years, google has only once caused us an issue (due to changes in privacy policy disclosure requirements that we had to rectify), whereas Apple has prevented us from deploying at least a dozen times over the same period, several times for issues that they hadn't flagged in previous releases, and sometimes having us wait for up to 2 days for re-review.

I guess it's a matter of anecdotes. I certainly don't have enough data (one + a half apps with countless updates) to make any serious claims. For us google has been more trouble, but I've heard other bad stories about apple too.

I'm freshly frustrated because I'm dealing with a random metadata rejection (on an "internal testing" build! nothing has changed!) just now.

The anecdotal remark is fair, it may just come down to the nature of one particular type of app vs another, but on a personal note, I find things like automated metadata rejections a lot less frustrating than fickle human rejections because I can debug metadata and resubmit to receive instant feedback - akin to fighting with a compiler - whereas with apple some issues require multiple days of back and forth with reviewers while I pathologically refresh the review status page. What I find to be most frustrating is when the reviewer responds with a change request, we fix the build, then the next reviewer rejects some other random thing that wasn't mentioned in the previous review, dragging out the release date even longer. Anyway, fuck em both, cheers!

I think the argument is not that the rules are inherently any nicer, but that there's an actual process where you can find out what you did wrong and fix it rather than just being banned out of the blue one day. (I'm not entirely convinced by this argument, on the basis that I've heard unpleasant stories about Apple changing policies and screwing people over, but it's a plausibly valid argument to make.)

In Android one can at least sideload apps. You can't do that with Apple.

I have almost as many apps sideloaded in my phone as apps from Google's play store.

Yeah, I've found App Store rejections to be harsh (functionality is not useful? ok) or restrictive, but always parseable. I even successfully asked the reviewer if a certain change would remedy the issue, they said yes, I resubmitted and that was that. Took about 2 days in all.

Play Store rejections are either an algorithmic mystery or reviewer incompetence. I don't mean reviewer incompetence in using the (maybe unintuitive) app. I mean their internal review UI had some kind of unrelated error and they sent me a screenshot of that. Their own console UI even sort of urges you to just resubmit with a potentially meaningless change instead of opening an appeal / request. Feels like it's the worst of both automatic and human review.

> I even successfully asked the reviewer if a certain change would remedy the issue, they said yes, I resubmitted and that was that. Took about 2 days in all.

You're lucky. I've asked them such questions. Most of the time they refuse to respond. Even if they do, there's a good chance you'll get a different reviewer for your next update with a completely different opinion and interpretation of The Guidelines.

It's possible to dislike both.

It's possible to dislike both while also pointing out a shortcoming in one compared to the other. Google could do much much better in terms of customers service; they could start by actually having literally any customer service.