Apple won't do something about this. Or rather, it won't do something soon enough. This opens a tremendous opportunity for a startup. The iPhone being dead is a begging invitation to bring locked-in iPhone developers out of their half-dead, zombie state back to life. Apple's fortress is but one Trojan horse away from falling.
If you wanted to make iPhone app releases faster, how would you do it? You'd probably need some sort of meta-app that runs other apps. This app would have to have a programming language and be able to run apps written in it. I personally wish I could write an app in a dynamic language, under my favorite text editor, and have this meta-App interpret it. I want to update the app while the app is running; not when the user syncs with iTunes. I want the language used to program the app to instrument things for me. I want to have analytics.
What's the most powerful iOS app you can build?