I'd love to know how many of those 40k rejections revise and get approved.
Even if we say, 80% of those are scammy ad/malware crap, that leaves 16k. (I'm using totally guessed numbers, so I'll say that while Sturgeon's law says 90% will be crap I'm deliberately including the crap that isn't scammy)
If most of those get revised and improved, cool. If not...that's a lot of frustrated potential developers.
I have an app that's been sitting in review for 9days now...
no feedback, nothing. It's been in the Mac App Store since it opened, but lately Apple has taken a dislike to my app, and likes to drag its feet with looooong review times. this has occurred with the last few updates. In the meantime, I have also released a completely different app, and updated that a couple times.
My company has an app that gets released every cpl weeks. One week we were rejected for auth reasons, except the screenshot of the login attempt in the rejection had mis-typed information. Delays aren't even always the developer's fault!
I've had an app that's been approved for over 6 months, with a new version every one or two weeks and it's always a coin toss. There are a number of times that I've released an update just to change an image in the app and the app gets rejected for not having enough content. Yet it's been approved over a dozen times without any change to the amount of content in the app.
I'd guess that somewhere near 100% get revised and resubmitted (Say, 90%+ ?).
Developing apps is a big investment in time (if nothing else). It's hard to imagine you could get to the point of having any kind of reasonable app to submit without overcoming a few roadblocks to get that far, so what's one more?
I suppose I don't have a good feel for the proportion of shovelware being submitted, where apps submitted is very low effort, and a "developer" would be fine with walking away from it. If there's a lot that would skew the numbers.
A majority of those 40% would be resubmitted, given that their most common rejection reason is “minor bugs”. Otherwise they wouldn’t qualify for the description “minor bugs”.
"would be" and "could be" are not the same. Note I'm not trying to "blame" (or justify) Apple here - just trying to get a grasp on how many people try and...stop (or are stopped).
If you manage to get an app to the point that the only thing between you and releasing is a “minor bug” and then halt there, I would be kind of shocked that you managed to get that far in the first place.
The second-place item is “privacy” rejections, which surely lead to many more developers abandoning their ideas. (Good.)
Apple did not provide enough data for us to answer your question with any more certainty, but at least they offered enough to guess with.
Even if we say, 80% of those are scammy ad/malware crap, that leaves 16k. (I'm using totally guessed numbers, so I'll say that while Sturgeon's law says 90% will be crap I'm deliberately including the crap that isn't scammy)
If most of those get revised and improved, cool. If not...that's a lot of frustrated potential developers.