It's bad that he didn't get any kind of feedback from Apple as to why... however this headline could also read "iPhone Developer Spends $600K Despite Having No Guarantees of Acceptance into Proprietary Platform" ...

The only thing you could really assign as Apple costing you for a delay, is the amount of money you would have made on your app during the time before you ultimately got accepted.

Whether you spent $600k or a weekend building it has nothing to do with apple costing you a dime.

Wasn't a story about this app for the same issue done a few months ago already?

(Googling...)

I found this article: http://www.macblogz.com/2008/12/17/iphone-dev-spends-500k-on... So yeah 3 months ago it was talked about and nothing has changed since.

The article should read Company Spends $600,000 Developing App for Proprietary Service that Violates TOS (but Gets No Response).

The article states "FreedomVoice was planning to charge a monthly rate of $5 for the service." This is a clear violation of the App Store TOS (although that will change once 3.0 comes out).

Then, it's simple. Reject the app. Say it violates TOS. Have a nice day.

I'm starting to think that the best way to do a big application is to start small and keep getting bigger. I haven't heard these horror stories of review problems once an application is launched. As it stands, I wouldn't attempt a large application on the system.

How is this a violation of the TOS? There are plenty of iPhone applications out there for SaaS (i.e. Evernote, rememberthemilk).

I wonder if there would be repercussions if he were to sell his application for jailbroken phones in the meantime.

That's OK, Google Voice would have crushed their dreams anyway.