And the verdict is…

Rejected.

I got a phone call from Apple on November 13th (4 days shy of 8 months after submission).  The representative explained that Apple is not approving any applications with political content, unless they are full political speeches for historical or educational purposes. The rep also stated that he had no idea why it had taken so long to tell me that, or why Apple hadn’t been able to tell me more when I requested an update back in June.  The response in June was that my app was taking longer to review than expected.

My application uses sound bites and pictures of President Obama.

So, where do I go from here?

If I develop anything more for the iPhone, it obviously will stay far away from anything political.

Is it worth it to bother?

The ceiling for iPhone apps is a few hundred thousand dollars, where a web site and service could be much higher. That App Store approval process is just a crazy roadblock, and nothing like that exists on the web as a whole.

I think if I do any more iPhone development, it won’t be the primary target – that is, the iPhone app would be an extension of another project, not the primary focus.

But at least I didn’t spend $600,000…