What Is Going On With The App Store?

After an extremely fun and very deboucherous weekend here in Chicago at Market Days, I have had to face the sad reality that I don't get to party like that all the time. Did I mention there were porn stars playing Twister in the least amount of clothing legally allowed in public? Yeah... good times.

Anyway, back to Apple. After having a blast this weekend, I came back to my computer to notice that a few more apps have been randomly pulled from the App Store. Remember that ridiculous I Am Rich app? Yeah, gonedy. You know that silly PhoneSaber app everyone had and subsequently annoyed their friends with? Gonezo too. Add those to Boxoffice and NetShare, and Apple's list of disappearing apps is growing at an alarming rate.

Now, I'm not one to say that any of these apps should or should not be there. But the question that remains is why they were pulled? None of the app makers have heard from Apple concerning why their apps were yanked (looks like the Phone Saber people pulled their App down themselves). A better question, at least in my opinion, is if these apps were so bad that they needed to be pulled down immediately and without notice, how did they make it through the approval process and up on the App Store in the first place?

Is the approval process that lax? Is the app approval team just a bunch of idiots? Or were they just trying way to hard to put up 500 apps in a matter of a couple weeks that a few "bad eggs" slipped through? Any way you cut it, it doesn't look good for Apple, and combined with the Mobile Me shenanigans and the other issues people have been having with their iPhone 3G, I'm starting to think this whole iPhone 3G business was just a big screw up. A screw up that has and will continue to make them a lot of money, mind you, but at what cost to their reputation and brand image?

So, Apple, what in the world if going on with your App Store?

UPDATE: Apparently, Jobs made some admissions recently to the Wall Street Journal about Apple's overt control-freak-ish "Kill Switch" and why they got rid of the I Am Rich app, but still offered no information on why it got approved in the first place.