I'm not so sure on your other theory though. I hope that one is not true. In fact, I hope they just wake up to how absurd their non-process has got sometime soon, and revamp it in a major way …

Warning – This is a bit longer than I expected…

I've been following the Stanford iTunes-U iPhone Programming course (thats a long name!) and one of the episodes had Loren Brichter (developer of Tweetie) as a special guest. He went over some of the events that seemed to significantly increase Tweetie's popularity. Many great things happened that got Tweetie a ton of recognition but no amount of press attention resulted in comparable sales than that that came when Apple reversed its App Store rejection of Tweetie. Since then, many other Apps have gone on to be wildly popular once Apple overturned their initial rejections.

For good reason, many people have been calling for an overhaul of the App Store approval process. One plausible, previously mentioned rumor is that Apple has been heavy handed due to the lack of a parental protection scheme and will relax once iPhone OS 3.0 ships with this added functionality. In addition, I've been wondering if Apple has actually recognized and is actively exploiting the marketing hype that results during an App store rejection debacle. Could it be that Apple has been using this to garner extra attention to certain Apps while claiming a simple mistake was made in the approval process? Especially considering the number of Apps that must be reviewed daily, a mistake here or there, as long as it is fixed promptly, is relatively forgivable and, for the most part, easily forgotten.