"Internet time", the incredibly-accelerated pace of
everything, is a modern myth, a lie we tell ourselves
I wouldn't call it a lie, because software scales better than humans do.
When you're saying "half a million apps and billions of downloads" it's as if Apple themselves worked on those apps and all of those downloads were manually packaged by Apple employees in envelopes, signed by Ive and sent by postal office. Well, actually, the number of downloads is irrelevant.
And if Apple can't handle the approval of those million apps, maybe that's because they've dug themselves into a corner by trying to force an asinine policy that doesn't even work for its intended purpose anyway.
1) It's effortless to build an infrastructure that handles reviewing half a million apps and hosting billions of downloads, and to scale up to those levels from nothing.
2) The app store review process doesn't serve its intended purpose.
If that interpretation's correct, how do you support those assertions?
#1 is demonstrably false, given the effort that many companies exert to handle reviewing and approving numerous kinds of content, and then vending that content to consumers around the world. Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and Google are just a few companies that have large chunks of their organization devoted to approving content (be it movies, ads, apps, or ebooks) and then supporting the systems which host and vend that content around the world. Both are non-trivial problems and difficult things to scale at those magnitudes. To claim otherwise is disingenuous.
I'd also claim that #2 is false. Malware is not a problem on the App Stores, and I feel eminently confident as a consumer that I can trust apps purchased on Apple's App Stores. As a developer, the review process has caught bugs in my apps before they've hit my users, and they've also been quick to approve updates that address urgent bugs that slipped past both my and their testing. You may disagree with some of their policies and the review process does make mistakes, but I don't believe you can assert they're largely ineffectual or incompetent, nor do I believe you can claim the process doesn't offer benefits to consumers. What other software store is as confidently and easily used by consumers around the world?
it's as if… all of those downloads were manually packaged by Apple employees in envelopes
Sure, that part does scale. The fact that scalable processes can scale is not a myth. The myth comes in when we get so dazzled by those awesome new scalable processes that we handwave away the distinction between that which scales, and that which does not.
When you speed up one portion of a process you don't speed up the process, you just move the bottleneck. The slowest and most expensive part of shipping an app used to be printing and mailing disks. Now it's App Store reviews. [1] Or producing documentation. Or deciding whether the buttons work better on the left or the right. Or the volume of calls to your support line, or posts to your online FAQ. In whole sectors of publishing the bottleneck is marketing: Your book, movie, app, or platform can't grow faster than the number of people who can be convinced to buy it, and convincing people is a very human-scale process; to build trust requires attention, and attention is not a scalable resource. Despite modest advances in brain-enhancing drugs, we still think and feel at about the same rate as ever, and despite advances in font technology the number of words we can read per waking hour is about the same as it was two hundred years ago.
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[1] Of course, the rate of shipping app updates depends on the speed of the review process, but the first derivative of the rate of shipping app updates depends on the rate at which new reviewers can be hired and trained, and that is even more of a human-scale process.
When you're saying "half a million apps and billions of downloads" it's as if Apple themselves worked on those apps and all of those downloads were manually packaged by Apple employees in envelopes, signed by Ive and sent by postal office. Well, actually, the number of downloads is irrelevant.
And if Apple can't handle the approval of those million apps, maybe that's because they've dug themselves into a corner by trying to force an asinine policy that doesn't even work for its intended purpose anyway.