I suppose I should begin with the caveats that
- I do not live in Europe so I do not know how things might work there.
- I do not own or manage a business. So also clueless there.
- I have not personally ever bought anything other than free apps from the Apple App Store.
So, what I am saying is that I can not answer your question. But I also suffer from Y-chromosome induced Male Answer Syndrome, so I'll try to answer anyway.
Let's start with the assumption that Apple wants to sell you these apps. You just have to track down someone to help you either at Apple or at the company which sells this Afaria app you mentioned.
You do not mention which country in Europe you are in. But I assume there is an Apple web site either for that country or for your native language. I suggest you go to that web site and search there for information on a volume licensing program.
For example, I tried looking at http://www.apple.com/uk/ and searched for volume license.
That search turned up this link: http://www.apple.com/uk/mac/volume-licensing/
Now the page that link took me too appears to apply to volume licensing only for the OS X Lion operating system. Still, the people involved would at least know something about Apple's Volume License process. So, if you were in the UK I would suggest you contact them and start a conversation.
Even if they can't help you they could still probably point you towards other Apple people who might be able to help you.
I suggest you try something like that with the Apple web site which targets your region in Europe.
I realize this would be a tedious and frustrating process. And I hope someone else provides a better answer to your question here. But unless they do, I think your best chance of solving your problem is to start working you way through people at Apple who would want to sell you something help you.
What Apple are saying is that the content your App would be pulling through is the property of the news / media outlets who produce it. As to not infringe on their copyright, you need to get approval from these news outlets that you can then show Apple to get your app approved.
Getting the news outlets to agree might depend largely on how you pose it to them, you want them to perceive being included in your app as beneficial to them. I don't know how the app is structured but maybe if you pull through teaser content for example and have links through to more content then that's where you can present a benefit to the news outlets. You need to contact someone in upper management in the first instance, someone who has the authority to authorise your use of the content, and maybe pitch it to them as follows:
Hi _________
My name is __________, I'm the head of ________ Software. I'm contacting you because of your role at ____________. My company has recently produced an app that aggregates news stories and provides links through to the media outlets who produced them, we're now looking for strategic relationships we can develop with key content producers to ensure our service always has the best array of content. We don't intend charging news outlets for displaying their content as we plan to monetize the app through other means, which means this service provides free promotion of your content. I believe that your organisation might be a really good fit for this service and was hoping we could have a phone conversation to discuss the matter further.
Please let me know when would be a good time for me to give you a call and I look forward to telling you more about our application.
Regards,
Hopefully that gets you started...
Best Answer
My experience is there is a fairly big delay in reviews showing up - but I would expect even the first review to get published within a month of posting should other ratings and reviews arrive for that app to separate it from an app that has less than 100 downloads ever.
I don't know for sure, but the ratings seem to be held back until 10 or 20 are submitted. Once you reach that limit the store will show the overall rating and only new versions get ratings once they hit their threshold (but a message stating not enough ratings are in to show).
It makes sense for users to expect a few points before any app gets zero or five stars and makes the ratings a useful measure that some handful of people expressed an opinion before they are shown.
After hearing about the delays, I've sometimes checked and my experience with about 50 reviews where I cared to check back, the shortest time was about 24 hours and the longest was 2 weeks for a review to appear. I've not had one not eventually get published, but I also don't generally review apps that have hundreds of reviews which is much harder to find your needle in the haystack of other reviews. I generally star those apps or write something and not bother to check if it ever made it live.