I appreciate your doubt, but am having a difficult time matching it up with the law. In specific, the DMCA safe harbor provisions only apply to entities that can be called "service providers", and Apple's prior-to-posting editorial control over the contents of their catalog then seems to be incompatible with the definitions that are laid out in USC ยง 512. Apple, playing the role of online retailer, thereby seems to be every bit as responsible for the content of their App Store as if they were to be hand-compiling printed catalogs of products for their own mail-order company for which they stocked their own inventory.
In comparison, Google pulls some ludicrous stunts to maintain separation: developers sign up separately for a payment merchant account (yes, also from Google ;P) and are legally responsible for things like their own sales tax collection (yes, this is insane). Google, then, attempts to claim that they are just a mechanism to allow direct-from-developer-to-user sales of products, and that their catalog is nothing more than web hosting. (This also has the horrible side effect, of course, that even if someone at Google has reason to believe something is sketch in their store, they have to not touch it and wait for something to come through channels.)
In comparison, Google pulls some ludicrous stunts to maintain separation: developers sign up separately for a payment merchant account (yes, also from Google ;P) and are legally responsible for things like their own sales tax collection (yes, this is insane). Google, then, attempts to claim that they are just a mechanism to allow direct-from-developer-to-user sales of products, and that their catalog is nothing more than web hosting. (This also has the horrible side effect, of course, that even if someone at Google has reason to believe something is sketch in their store, they have to not touch it and wait for something to come through channels.)