The expense to review them deeply used to be large, a few years ago. There should be a review process that consists of putting the source code in some escrow build environment and letting an LLM do a full audit. What would that be, a few bucks at-cost?

Okay, can you concoct some prompt-injection-like scenario where you can fool increasingly sophisticated agents about the presence of your malware? Sure, maybe. It's MILES ahead of where both major app stores are today, though, where you can find obvious scams that sailed through review just by looking at their description.

Why would it be large? Or problematically so.

Apple releases numbers: 130,000 app reviews per week.

The human component to this doesn't need to do much more than verify it works, they say they churn through that with just 500 reviewers that must be costing just a few $10s of millions.

They could certainly do a better job, but maybe that means 2,500 reviewers? That'd cost them half-a-year of Roblox's commissions.

If Google needs 2x as many that's 5,000 people, their whole Roblox commission. There are more people working at their HQ, and this is a job they can distribute between cheaper countries.

AI apps are flooding everything. No doubt they are using or planning to use AI to help manage the load.

And then of course all the apps will use some kind of AI, and because humans don’t care to wade through a trillion tip calculators or whatever, they’ll use AI to pick the app. And then have AI use the app for them through a voice assistant.

>>the cost of a false rejection is very low.<<

maybe in the short term, and if thier app store is a loss leader.

Exact same philosophy they use for hiring.

If only they would charge developers exorbitant fees that could fund such work...

Of course I understand that they are not going to spend money on improving their review process for our benefit until regulators force them to.