Their idea of making it better is to require review before the developer is even allowed to upload a build for testing ? I can't think of any other app store which requires this sort of thing; it doesn't actually solve any problem. Malicious users can claim to be whoever they want, and I can't imagine unauthorized package ports are a serious problem. If you're trying to make something simple, remove really stupid ste…
What pre-upload review are you talking about? I read through the steps, and I don't see anything other than the web form to generate an AppArmor policy, which seems completely automated. EDIT: You're probably talking about the "APPLYING FOR ACCESS" section: To ensure that we are giving upload access only to the original author or a proper representative of the upstream project, we will require that person to request…
Also it's very common in distros for maintainers to be granted only access to a list of packages, which is similar to what Ubuntu is doing here (and indeed already does). In the distro case, the maintainer is usually different from the principal developer of the program.