Apple's app store policies are far more capricious, e.g. my company's e-commerce app was rejected because the splash screen displays a shopping cart with a Microsoft Surface in it. We've had many more problems fighting Apple's app store than Google's.
I mean you say that, but having done about ~60 releases for the same app on both platforms over the last three years, google has only once caused us an issue (due to changes in privacy policy disclosure requirements that we had to rectify), whereas Apple has prevented us from deploying at least a dozen times over the same period, several times for issues that they hadn't flagged in previous releases, and sometimes having us wait for up to 2 days for re-review.
I guess it's a matter of anecdotes. I certainly don't have enough data (one + a half apps with countless updates) to make any serious claims. For us google has been more trouble, but I've heard other bad stories about apple too.
I'm freshly frustrated because I'm dealing with a random metadata rejection (on an "internal testing" build! nothing has changed!) just now.
The anecdotal remark is fair, it may just come down to the nature of one particular type of app vs another, but on a personal note, I find things like automated metadata rejections a lot less frustrating than fickle human rejections because I can debug metadata and resubmit to receive instant feedback - akin to fighting with a compiler - whereas with apple some issues require multiple days of back and forth with reviewers while I pathologically refresh the review status page. What I find to be most frustrating is when the reviewer responds with a change request, we fix the build, then the next reviewer rejects some other random thing that wasn't mentioned in the previous review, dragging out the release date even longer. Anyway, fuck em both, cheers!
I think the argument is not that the rules are inherently any nicer, but that there's an actual process where you can find out what you did wrong and fix it rather than just being banned out of the blue one day. (I'm not entirely convinced by this argument, on the basis that I've heard unpleasant stories about Apple changing policies and screwing people over, but it's a plausibly valid argument to make.)
