Apple’s been hard at work trying to remedy the disease that is the App Store review process. It’s lengthy, arbitrary, and creates more drama for the company than other issue. But Phil Schiller can only be in so many places at once, and try as it might, Apple is still letting apps fall through the cracks. Big apps. Highly anticipated apps. Facebook 3.0 apps.

We’ve been hearing about the new Facebook app for months, and it really does sound awesome. It adds a lot of features I won’t re-reprint here. But the app is stuck in review limbo, awaiting the whimsical approval of the 40-man review team, and even the developers are starting to speak out.

Facebook 3.0 developer Joe Hewitt has been the man primarily responsible for keeping the public up to date on the app’s progress. You really have to applaud the guy for making his submission public because it puts a lot of pressure on Apple (a move Real copied this week). Hewitt’s gone public again, this time with a long list of level-headed complaints for the review team. My favorite goes like this:

Oh, but you say that iPhone apps are different, because they run native code and can do scary things that web pages can’t? Again, you’re wrong, because iPhone apps are sandboxed and have scarcely any more privileges than a web app. About the only scary thing they can do outside the sandbox is access your address book, but Apple can easily fix that by requiring they ask permission first, just like they must do to track your location.

Be sure to read the rest of the post. It could have been a lot of whining and moaning and “I’m smarter than all of Apple combined.” Instead, Hewitt put together a solid argument for the dissolution of the App Store review process.