The Mythical App Store Reviewer Month

The Mythical Man-Month is a book by Fred Brooks about software project management. The book has become famous in the industry, along with an observation from the book known as Brooks’s law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. I’d like to make an analogy between software development and Apple App Store review. A common, cursory reaction to the obvious failures of app review, the continual appearance of countless scams in the App Store, is to suggest that Apple hire more reviewers. My contention is that adding reviewers is not a solution to the problem of App Store curation, and the belief in such a solution is a myth. I don’t claim that hiring more reviewers would make app review slower. Rather, I think that meaningful, effective curation can’t be measured simply by the amount of available labor, much like Brooks argues that the possibility of measuring useful work in units of time, man-months, is a myth. Here are some statistics from an Apple web page about the…