It's really not that hard. At the end of the day it's just a human making quick decisions hundreds of times a day.
I've had more than my share of rejected updates that get approved after a re-submission with no change.
> At the end of the day it's just a human making quick decisions hundreds of times a day.
My company had a version of our communications app in the app store for several years. We decided to sell private-branded versions for some customers where the only differences were the color palette and logo shown on the login screen.
For the app versions we created for customers, one was approved on first review, another required a couple months of back-and-forth with the reviewer, and the third never got approved.
You and I know, but the great majority of the people in the world do not.
And, of course, we only see the cases where the scam app gets through. The success rate for these scams might be pretty low, but from our perspective we wouldn't know.
> You and I know, but the great majority of the people in the world do not.
It's literally an app reviewer's job to know that. Having random people on the street reviewing apps would not be very useful. Although sadly, that may be close to the truth:
> You and I know, but the great majority of the people in the world do not.
Relevance? When there is already an app called LastPass published by LogMeIn with millions of downloads, clearly you don't approve an app called LastPass published by a "Parvati Patel"