> This trend of running straight to social news sites (e.g. HN) whenever something goes wrong is very strange

This seems more general than just when things go wrong. I've noticed a lot of posts on Reddit in /r/math and /r/physics from college students asking for advice on what order to take classes, for example. A student might state he is a math major, and want to know if he should take linear algebra or real analysis first. Typically, he omits to state what school he attends, or what kind of math he is interested in.

These questions puzzle me, because the answer to this kind of question depends on details of the school's math curriculum, and vary from school to school. For instance, at some schools linear algebra is the first "proofs" course, and typically should be taken after freshman calculus as a transition to higher math.

At other schools there is a separate course specifically on proofs and mathematical reason designed to prepare students to transition from the practical oriented calculus courses to the theory oriented "real" math classes. At such a school, the order of linear algebra and real analysis is probably best determined by what courses have which as prerequisites and what the student is interested in.

I would expect the obvious thing to do when wondering what order to take courses in would be to (1) check the requirements for your degree--there should be specific courses you have to take so you need to make sure you don't do anything to screw taking those, (2) work out from that and from the prerequisites from those courses any constraints on when you must take specific courses, (3) look at examples your school gives of typical schedules for students pursuing that degree, and (4) TALK TO YOUR ADVISOR--I assume schools still assign to each student an advisor in their major to give them guidance on course selection and such.

Similarly, people will post saying they are taking a course in X next term, and would like to get a head start--what book should they read? Again, the often don't tell us the school so we can go look up the course and try to figure out what level it is at. They don't tell us what the textbook is so we can pick something that fits in well with that.

It apparently never occurs to them to ask their professor what would be a good book, or to ask older students who have already taken the class, or to go to the library and spend an afternoon looking at a few books on the subject to find one on their own.

In my experience the appeal board are just as stupid as the reviewer cited in the post. It was like my app was evaluated by a random different reviewer.

Something is strange about the whole app review process. It's been problematic for years. Apple could fix it if they had the incentive. IMO they do have an incentive (more developers, more sales etc) but something else is preventing the process from improving. Lately it seems like the review process is becoming worse.

Perhaps it's company politics? The VP of whatever group is ultimately in charge of hiring reviewers, adjusting policies etc may be standing in the way. However given the explosion of the mobile ecosystem it seems unlikely that organizational politics would come first.

One side note: for my last app that was reviewed and rejected multiple times (once by the appeal board) it seemed like the reviewers were really trying hard to make the app crash. I log almost everything users do in the app. Since the only people with copies of the app were myself and Apple I could see the reviewer(s) activity. If you've tested iOS apps that use even basic tableViews populated with remote data you know that swiping vigorously, pushing and popping viewControllers quickly etc can wring out some funny corner cases. It seems like the reviewer was trying to find one as a pretense for rejecting the app when the real reason was something they didn't want to say. Apparently they didn't find anything and went with "app is just a re-packaged website without enough native iOS functionality" when the entire app uses native iOS features.

Are you actually complaining that the reviewer was performing some QA-like functionality? That's surprising. You may also be misinterpreting. Quickly going through an entire app (which is what I'd expect a reviewer [who's actually testing the app] to do) is necessarily going to involve lots of really quick pushes and pops of VCs and swipes and whatnot. So no, I don't think the reviewer was trying to find some pretext to reject you. That doesn't even make sense. Why would a reviewer need that?

Perhaps I did misinterpret. However the given reason for rejecting the app suggests there's something else going on behind the scenes. "Your app doesn't have enough native iOS functionality" is obviously BS when the app's primary navigation is a tableView, uses the accelerometer and in general is filled with native iOS functionality.

Maybe the app's use of Google maps was frowned upon because of some tense relationship between the two companies. So instead of rejecting the app for "using Google maps because we don't feel comfortable with that" the reviewer tried to find a crash. When they couldn't they gave me the hilarious BS reasons. Hence a pretense to reject the app could make the reviewer's life easier.

"before even attempting to resolve it using the normal methods" - I know I left it wide-open for assumptions like this. I'll update the post with what has transpired since my conversation with him.

Because this kind of idiocy needs to have light shined on it.