Mark Gurman, Bloomberg, in an interview with Phillip Shoemaker, who ran app reviews from 2009 to 2016:

App reviewers worked in small conference rooms with Macs, iPhones, and iPads to test applications. Reviewers would come in each morning, pick 30 to 100 apps from a web tool, and download them devices for testing. It was a job that required long hours, Shoemaker recalled. Apple has hired more reviewers since then, and the work spaces in California are more open and collaborative now.

No small thanks go to Phil Schiller for retooling the system, radically improving the approval cycle.

Apple made sure that Shoemaker’s review team treated all third-party developers equally, even if they were giant technology companies supplying important apps for iPhones and iPads. “I was calling out Facebook all the time” on Twitter, he said. “Even though they were one of these privileged developers, they had some of the worst code at the time.”

Ouch.

Here’s a link to the interview, an episode of the Decrypted podcast.