22January2026
09:30 Master's Defense Room 85 of IC2
Topic on
Why mobile apps get rejected: an empirical analysis of the causes, the impacts on development processes, and the strategies adopted by developers to deal with these situations.
Student
Bernardo do Amaral Teodósio
Advisor / Teacher
Breno Bernard Nicolau de France
Brief summary
CONTEXT: Billions of people use apps on their smartphones every day. These apps are downloaded from stores like the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store, which correspond to the Android and iOS platforms, respectively. Google and Apple operate in a duopoly, given that their app stores come pre-installed on a large portion of smartphones sold. For an app to be published in app stores, it needs to go through a review process where it must meet a series of guidelines and policies defined by the stores. These factors should be considered by stakeholders during the process of developing new applications and their subsequent updates – otherwise, the submission may be rejected or the application removed after publication. Academic and grey literature shows that many applications are removed and that review processes are not always accurate: sometimes applications that violate guidelines are approved, while others are rejected or removed, creating difficulties for developers, who do not always understand why this happens. OBJECTIVE: Motivated by this context, we conducted exploratory studies in this work with the aim of understanding how companies and developers deal with rejections and removals, as well as the main impacts of these situations on their daily lives. METHODS: To this end, we conducted an Ad-hoc Literature Review to understand the state of the art on the subject, followed by an analysis and classification of the guidelines of the two stores, and a study of Mining Software Repositories with the aim of identifying discussions in open-source repositories about the review process. Finally, we conducted a Qualitative Study where we interviewed 15 participants, with the aim of collecting directly from the developers their perspectives and experiences regarding the store review processes. We used the Grounded Theory method for data collection and analysis. RESULTS: We obtained a theory that emerged from the data describing the phenomenon of rejections and removals in app stores, explaining the factors that cause it, the approaches used by developers to deal with the problem, the consequences and impacts that a rejection or removal can cause, and also examples of interaction with the stores throughout the review process. We also contribute a consolidated process built from the participants' accounts that summarizes the steps present in an application development workflow, and as additional results, the complete Codebook resulting from the interviews, as well as the classification of the guidelines into groups and macro-groups. CONCLUSION: We identified factors that can cause rejections or removals, ranging from omissions and errors by developers to difficulties in dealing with guidelines, as well as perceptions of subjectivity in reviews. Furthermore, we identified strategies and precautions adopted to deal with the review process, such as interactions with contacts in the app stores, attempts to reason with the reviewers, and monitoring updates to the guidelines. We also reported impacts caused by the phenomenon, such as delays and missed deadlines, the need to change dates, roadmap alterations, discomfort within teams, changes in business requirements, and impacts on developer well-being.
Examination Board
Headlines:
| Breno Bernard Nicolau de França | IC / UNICAMP |
| Bruno Barbieri de Pontes Cafeo | IC / UNICAMP |
| Cleidson Ronald Botelho de Souza | FACOMP/UFPA |
Substitutes:
| Emanuel Felipe Duarte | IC / UNICAMP |
| Paulo Sergio Medeiros dos Santos | CCET/UNIRIO |