Comment by int_19h

> Consider the potential number of new apps per day to an app store. Now imagine that each app requires 10-60 minutes of a halfway intelligent human's time to review. That's not such a huge staff required, especially compared to the revenue of said app store.

I'm not sure this adds up. By my counting, taking the total number of apps currently in the store, it would add up to something like 700 apps/day - which is reasonable. But as I understand, they review submissions rather than apps (or at least they should, for this process to make any sense) - which means that new versions of the same app also need to be reviewed, and then the same version might get reviewed multiple times if it gets rejected. Given the update frequency for a typical mobile app, this all would add up really quickly.

Could they still afford it? I bet. But it would be a significant expense.