Does anyone know if large developers get any sort of special treatment with submissions? It's hard to imagine that they'd make EA or Disney wait 14+ days in between app submissions.
Yes -- Apple makes direct review contacts available to larger companies, permits them to break certain portions of the SDK agreement, and provides assistance and status information while navigating the (much more friendly) review process.
They also provide leg-ups by negotiating feature of their applications, etc.
Maybe a bunch of the smaller app developers need to get together and form a large umbrella organization (that they are all share holders in) to get the better treatment.
How could they not? Apple created a completely opaque submission system on purpose; in order to retain full control over what goes into the store.
I think not only do large companies get a much faster and simpler submission process, but I also believe the current landscape of the entire app store has an impact on your submission. If 1000 action games just got submitted and that part of the store is currently saturated, I am positive Apple will hold back any more action game submissions for a while and possibly even reject perfectly valid submissions.
After all, Apple is making money off these apps too, they have a vested interested in maximizing what goes into the store.
I was wondering about that yesterday when chatting in the Facebook iPhone app. I remember that there was a story about an app being rejected being the chat bubbles used in it looked too similar to the ones existing in the SMS/MMS app from Apple (basically the iChat look).
However, the bubbles used by the Facebook app are exactly the same as the one in SMS/iChat.
Maybe it passed through the review process by mistake, but you have to wonder…
