[grzm]

Can you firm this up a bit? If money talks, why would Apple want to keep crappy apps in the App Store? These apps aren't going to make much at all in the short run for Apple, and in the long run will turn off users. Do you think Apple isn't going to do something about these? Or is it more that they haven't been proactive enough? Something else?

[beedogs]

Vetting apps costs money. Why bother? The end-user app rating system will sort it out eventually.

[mattnewton]

Alternate explaination: verifying this many apps and all their updates/changes is really hard to keep up with.

[ksk]

How is it an alternate explanation? If you hire only one janitor it takes longer to clean the premises. Its not really an explanation when you're sitting on piles of cash.

[mattnewton]

Assuming hiring and training janitors is instant, and buying them up on a massive scale does nothing to the cost of each janitor, and there is no pressure to accept apps quickly, sure, but that's not the scale world Apple lives in.

I think that's a false equivalence. The devil is in the details with large projects like this.

[ksk]

There will be absolutely no change to the cost of each janitor because the scale is not massive at all. Apple is most certainly not hiring thousands of full time employees for app reviews. In 2009 they had 40 employees spending 6 minutes (at most) on each app.

http://fortune.com/2009/08/22/40-staffers-2-reviews-8500-iph...