[gcr]

What pre-upload review are you talking about? I read through the steps, and I don't see anything other than the web form to generate an AppArmor policy, which seems completely automated.

EDIT: You're probably talking about the "APPLYING FOR ACCESS" section:

    To ensure that we are giving upload access only to the original
    author or a proper representative of the upstream project, we
    will require that person to request upload access for their
    application. The author or representative must first create an
    account and user profile in the MyApps portal as it currently
    exists.
    
    Once their profile is created, they will need to be able to
    request upload access for a package, providing details about
    their association with the upstream project. If the submitter is
    not the owner or representative of the project, they will be
    required to provide a URL to a webpage, blog post or mailing list
    archive showing that the owner or representative of the project
    is endorsing their effort upload the application to the Ubuntu
    Software Center.

This is an interesting requirement in our open-source world of forks, clones, and mods/patches. The concept of "ownership" in OSS is intentionally very loose, and ensuring only the owner can upload to the app center makes sense in a brand-focused business/product point of view, but seems kind of strange from a software developer point of view.

How could an app store like this work with users trusting developers' GPG keyrings, or something similar?

[rwmj]

FWIW CPAN works like this. A "namespace" (eg. IO::Foo) is essentially assigned to a user and only they can upload packages in this namespace. [http://www.cpan.org/modules/04pause.html#namespace]

Also it's very common in distros for maintainers to be granted only access to a list of packages, which is similar to what Ubuntu is doing here (and indeed already does). In the distro case, the maintainer is usually different from the principal developer of the program.

[dplanella]

Note that it's more like the concept of a 'team' or 'project' rather than a single owner. Anyone endorsed by the team who creates the app (where a team can be a single person) can upload new versions.

[Evbn]

All open source projects have a list of committers and a maintainer or few. Ubuntu's system respects that. Do you want me uploading a "new version" of something you wrote? Who am I? I am some evil hacker.