Steven Frank: They understand there are problems, and they are listening and acting.

Recently an update to my small pregnancy tracking application was unexpectedly delayed for a month and a half. Towards the end of that time I was pretty frustrated, with no communication at all from Apple.

But then I got a very nice call from what I would call the person that gives developers the bad news. He was extremely polite and pleasant to talk to, and informed me that the application description can’t have any mention of giving part of the proceeds to charity. The reason being someone might come back to Apple asking for a charity receipt or proof that the money actually went to the charity in question.

I changed the description while we were talking, and a day and a 1/2 later the update was available on the app store.

What did I glean from my conversation with him?

• There is a ‘first level team’ of app store reviewers that go through a predefined list of things to check.

• If anything is found, it’s marked for follow up or outright rejected, and the first level reviewer moves on to the next app.

• At some point these next level people get around to looking at the marked apps and contact developers.

I do believe that Apple is working hard to be more transparent with the process, and over the upcoming months we’ll see the app store become a better place to sell our software.