Has the App Store turnaround process significantly improves in 2010?

John Brownlee ()

Has the App Store turnaround process significantly improves in 2010?The iTunes App Store approval process is infamous for its impenetrability, its arbitrariness and its Leviathan-like slowness to move. Yet Apple’s been remarkably good about improving the App Store approval process in recent months: sure, apps are rejected as arbitrarily as ever, but recent changes to iTunes Connect have made figuring out just how far through the process an app is to approval or rejection far more transparent. But if recent dev reports are anything to go by, Apple might have also managed to improve approval times as well.

According to some of the developers quoted by TUAW, Apple has significantly improved the turnaround time of app approval. In fact, some of the new turnaround times border on the preternatural. Consider Atomic Cactus’ anecdote:

I’m a developer behind Atomic Cactus, we have 3 games currently in the app store, and they all took approximately 2-3 weeks to get approved. Today at 4:00 am I submitted for approval our latest app, which isn’t exactly a “fart app” (it’s a pretty polished puzzle game with OpenFeint). As of 1:30 pm today, the app is in the app store.

In other words, Atomic Cactus submitted an app and had it approved in a little under ten hours. Amazing, and heartening to hear if true! Any app developers out there able to confirm or deny an improvement in App Store turnaround time? Let us know in the comments.

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About the author

John BrownleeJohn Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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  • chano

    Dunno.
    Should we cares?
    Does it matters?
    Can we writes?

  • Simon Landon

    Ha, you beats me to its.

  • http://code4dev.com Dave

    Our Golf Gigolo app – http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/golf-gigolo-a-hilarious-game-for/id349195109?mt=8 – went from submission to in store in 25 hours flat. We have seen similar turn around for upgrades and new apps since the Christmas closure break, anywhere from same day to 3 days but so far (knock on wood) no more 2-3 week waits

  • Henry

    My grammars is fails.

  • http://www.5ftmonkey.com dab

    I submitted a lite version of 5ft Monkey yesterday, in just 13 hours its gone from “waiting for review” to “in review”. Previously his would have taken about 10 days.

    I suspect the approval process has improved partly because they no longer update the release date on updated apps. This was a big deal because you could keep your app near the top of the newly released list by simply issuing minor updates on a regular basis. Shortly before Christmas they changed it so updates did not change the release date of an app and so kept them off the top of the newly released list.

    A short approval time on the old system would have been a disaster with apps being updated every few days (not just every few weeks) to stay at the top and newly released apps struggling for air amongst the thousands of already released apps in the newly released list.

    Now that they’ve eliminated this loophole they can speed up the process as much as they want without any undesirable consequences.

  • http://www.appadvice.com Alexander
  • http://www.jaredjudd.com JaredJudd

    http://www.jaredjudd.com/Jared_Judd/iPhone/Entries/2010/1/10_CootieLert.html

    Mine was approved in 48 hours, but 36 of it was a weekend. So it seems that they don’t have quite the turnaround in their off hours, but definitely fast during the working week.