"Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence."

--Napoleon Bonaparte

Daring Fireball's John Gruber recently did another bit on the app store review process. While I usually enjoy his satire (brushed metal anyone?), this one didn't seem quite right. The piece is funny enough, but I hate to think that they are being intentionally cruel or evil. Despite the above quote, I'm not even sure that incompetence is involved at the level of the individual reviewers.

I have my own theory on why there are so many rejections and why many highly publicized rejections seem so silly:

• The large pool of reviewers are likely judged on how many apps they handle over a period of time.
  

By handle, I mean download, install, evaluate, approve/reject and feedback. If this is the case, then the apparent problems result from the fact that rejections can be done quickly (by finding/exaggerating/creating a violation) and that approval takes time (the entire app must be checked against the iPhone SDK Agreement Section 3.3 and its fifteen subsections).

In the case of Eucalyptus, The reviewer found it took almost no time at all to reject the app by searching for the Kama Sutra. If the intention was to approve the app, then the reviewer would have had to confirm and checkoff every feature against the long list of guidelines.

By quickly rejecting the app, the reviewer can move on to the next item, increasing his number of "handled" apps. Meanwhile, the developer is left feeling bullied and angry. It ultimately ends up a disservice to the millions of App Store users now denied the ability to purchase and benefit from Eucalyptus.

This, again, is just my own speculation but it could explain stories like the Tweetie rejection, the NIN rejection, and even the bizarre green icon rejection. It also explains why the feedback emails are often short.

There are many examples of mis-incentives across every industry. The New York Times has a great piece on the NBA addressing how focusing on the wrong stats can cost you games. In the early days of phone support, operators were graded on how many customers they handled in an hour. This lead to the operator hanging up in the middle of difficult or long support calls, so they could fish for easier, shorter calls to boost their daily numbers. Customers would become more upset and managers didn't understand why their internal metrics didn't match external surveys of customer satisfaction.

You have to incentivize the right metric and apps/hour is not it. The iTunesConnect entity within Apple may or may not believe that the developers it serves are its customers. However, if they don't evolve, refine and improves their service (like Apple evolves, refines and improves its iPods), developers will leave the ecosystem and writers will continue to make fun of them.