[SirWart]

I was a little confused about why they had to reject gambling cheating apps, given that I could use safari to create an app with identical functionality. However, Apple is also selling the app and charging the customers credit card, which must make them more liable for something like that.

Given that, it seems like reviews are a necessity, at least for the top tier of the App Store. Right now there are basically two tiers, App Store apps and Safari apps. The gulf between them is so huge that almost everyone is ignoring Safari apps. What they need is a middle tier of native apps that can be installed from the web that live outside the App Store ecosystem. Obviously Apple wouldn't be able to get a 30% cut of all sales, but the experience of installing these apps (finding the app manually, putting in credit card information, and manually upgrading the app) would still leave most users using the App Store. Apple would have to give up other benefits as well, such as being able to keep out competitors to the built-in apps and enforce the private API rules, so they probably are not going to do it unless absolutely forced to.