If Google are _really_ reviewing the apps, creating a 3-day backlog to get approved, then I say "Bravo! The world could absolutely use less crapware on the Google Play store." But, the cynic in me tells me this is just a ploy by them to put on a masquerade of actually caring.
Yeah this seems strange. How could they go from no reviews whatsoever to being so efficient they can review all app submissions in just 3 days. The Play Store gets more app submissions per day today than the App Store did back when it took Apple weeks to review each submission. Google doesn't even provide human customer service for most of their products, so how are they suddenly so efficient at this?
They could start by automatically accepting apps they haven't gotten around to after 3 days of being in-queue. After some period of practice and improvements, if the team they prepared still can't handle the workload without the automatic acceptance fallback, then they can increase the team size. I'm just guessing a plan like that is doable.
They could also have been practicing with a simulation of the review process using real-world app submissions for a while before this, and gotten the experience from that.
The real reason behind this will be automated generation of spammy apps.
Imagine you write a script which creates a spammy app (eg. no content, 100% ads). You launch on the play store, and instantly insert a few 5* fake reviews, and then for the next 10 minutes you do a heavy ad blitz all over the internet and other mobile apps to get a decent installed base.
All those users now see what 'appears' to be a brand new app, already getting decent reveiws! They install it, only to find it's junk. Many won't bother to uninstall, so the app maker gets to keep popping up modal ads and running a background service for years...
Repeat the whole process 20 minutes later with another procedurally generated app on a new account...
An interesting tidbit is that their ads had 27% click-through rate. They believe it was due to the games were much better than whatever the ad was showing, so people clicked it to get away.
