App Store Approvals Suddenly Much Faster?

Posted by Evan

As iPhone developers know, Apple shut down iTunes Connect and their App Store approval pipeline for a few days over Christmas. When it came back, everything looked about the same — except for increasing anecdotal evidence that approval times have gotten a lot shorter.

The classic pattern used to be that nothing got through in less than two weeks, and some apps took much longer. In a simple case, it would generally take about a week for an uploaded binary to move from “Waiting for Review” to “In Review”, and then there might be another week before approval (or rejection).

Since the holidays, I’ve personally seen an app submitted at the end of a week go into review on the weekend, and receive approval by noon Monday. Better yet, I know someone whose app recently went from “Waiting for Review” to “In Review” within ten minutes of uploading to iTunes.  Here are some other data points:

With a new year come New Year’s resolutions: It appears as if Apple’s review teams not only became incredibly fast, they also seem to have changed some processes to the better.

Scattered reports on Twitter indicate, that recent app submissions got approved within hours – yes, you’ve read that right.

While in 2009 developers even turned their backs on the iPhone platform entirely, because of weeks and months of wait time before their apps hit the store, approving within hours has never reportedly happened before.

Another indication for a changed approach occurred to myself: Using private application programing interfaces (APIs) no longer causes a fully automated reject…

Another case linked from the comments:

Can you believe it, just last week after posting that TriOut has been submitted to Apple’s iTunes app store less than seven days later, TriOut is now availible for download in app Store…

Assuming this pattern holds up, it’s great to see Apple taking some action on their number one developer complaint. This has been more than just an annoyance; it has prevented certain business models from evolving at all.

If you’re building apps for yourself, you can choose to grit your teeth and wait out Apple. But when trying to get clients to commit to iPhone apps, especially advertising clients used to having websites deployed on demand, it’s been really difficult to hold their interest after The Talk. You know the one: “It may take several weeks to get this into the App Store after completion, and we can’t predict exactly how long it will take, and then we might get rejected and we would need to resubmit and wait several more weeks…”

As Flash developers know, areas like adware, promotional tie-ins, and branded casual games can be some of the highest-margin work out there. The iPhone has barely begun to tap into this, partly due to the unreliability of the App Store release process. But it seems like we can now be at least cautiously optimistic.