I feel pretty vindicated, because I've been saying all along that the App Store review process is pointless at best, because the things apps are usually rejected for are fairly petty and it has almost no way of picking up on anything but the dumbest malware.
I think that should be "the things that people make a huge fuss about are pretty petty." I think that the review process adds a certain value to the App Store. I know that if I download an app, (1) it will run and (2) it will do more or less what the description says. That is not to say that this is the one true way, but it adds value.
I think a model that the web has followed is better: apps should be ranked based on some organic factors (e.g.: content of description + reviews) and the best apps can just float to the top. Security can be ensured via reviews/ratings + sandboxes access to phone's core functions.
I think you may have misunderstood the term "petty." Even the rejections people don't make a fuss about are fairly petty for the most part (dictionary definition: "of little importance; trivial"). They're mostly things like "You forgot this one guideline" or "You have a small bug in this part of the app."
Same as the Debian policy. That doesn't seem to be a big deal in that community. Are the guidelines for the the App Store? Does it seem okay to ship a product with known bugs? Admittedly, I've never gotten an app approved by Apple, but as an iPhone user I can appreciate these things.
Well, ignoring for the moment that there's always some controversy with regards to contributions to Debian and other Linux distributions, Debian doesn't have an app store. If there is software you can't get using apt-get out of the box, for example, if you want the real firefox and not iceweasel, you might need to add a repository to your config file. Or maybe just wget a url and install a .deb file manually. Or you can just download the source and compile it yourself.
Can't do any of that on the iPhone. It's the app store or you figure out some way to beat Apple's security.
My point with this is that while Apple is going about things the wrong way, they are in fact adding value. Simply removing the approval process and letting any app into the app store will be a bad thing.
