App Approval Times – What We’re Seeing

Online news reports and forums are filled to the gills with iPhone developers claiming to be seeing astronomical improvements on app approval times since the new year. The old days of no transparency and months of waiting are finally over, they proclaim.

So what are we seeing? Well, we’re seeing improvements, but nothing through the roof quite yet.

Our latest app, the FunkBox Drum Machine, was submitted to Apple about five days ago, and was just approved this afternoon. Our wait times were never that bad to begin with – we were seeing weeks, not months.

With this latest release, we’re definitely seeing an improvement, especially how fast the app gets placed “in review”, which took all of three hours. But we then waited for five days before getting released into the iTunes App Store. Other developers are reporting updates to apps being approved in a few hours, and brand new apps in twenty four hours. We sure didn’t see that.

Sure, we may have got caught up in some Apple employee getting us into their approval queue and then heading out for the three day weekend, so this may not be the best time to test out the store’s approval timeline improvements. We’ve got another app to submit in the next few weeks, we’ll hopefully get some twenty-four hour goodness on that one. The trend is definitely heading in the favor of iPhone developers, sounds like Apple is listening to the community and responding.