We’ve been working on some volume licensing deals for Grackl, but for some reason every time I get any traction on this front the trail goes suddenly dead. A little bit of sleuthing uncovered a disturbing fact: there is no volume licensing of iPhone Apps.

I find this particularly unfathomable. Apple’s a major player – perhaps the major player – in K12 and Higher Education technology sales. This is a market that exists exclusively in volume licensing terms. This means that all those every-student-gets-an-iPod-Touch deals are coming either completely bare of any software, can only utilize free software, or are going exclusively to schools which have the budgets for custom development.

Every day, Apple is getting calls from schools who want hundreds iPod Touches and iPads, along with hundreds of copies of apps like KidCalc, Graphing Calculator, and Word Magic. Right now, Apple’s answer is simple: No. This is bad for everyone from the customers to the developers to Apple itself. Apple’s internal sales reps are even being told that they can only recommend free App Store solutions to their customers and they’ve been specifically told not to help their customers find workarounds for this.

My sources reported several months ago that Apple was working on it and that it was a priority. However, when I verified this information with other sources this morning, I was told that nothing has changed.