Informative post, I can confirm a lot of the same experiences and frustrations except we had a much different experience with timing. It definitely DID NOT take 2 weeks from start to finish for us.
They must have improved the developer approval process and bank contract processing significantly. It took nearly 7 weeks for our bank contracts to get approved, and we used a major int`l bank - Wells Fargo. By the time it was all said and done, our first app took over a month to get on the store.
Hi! You should've been approved for a developer account. I suppose the delay could go past two minutes. We'll be speeding up this process soon. Hopefully in aggregate it only took you less than two mins :-) If you have any issues, ping me at support@store.app!
I was wondering if there was a difference for company or individual developers?
We registered as a company and just getting the legal department to allow us to submit took 4 weeks. After that the review of the application "Stay Tonight" took only about 2 weeks, but it did not show in a AppStore search for 2 more weeks. In fact we had to report an incident for it to show up in a search. Then the date of availability was left to the approval date and not the discoverability date, so we never showed in the new app section. So it took about 8 weeks, not too bad.
More people = less consistency. A common complaint among developers has been the inconsistency of approvals, where one app may be rejected while another one with similar features is improved.
Right now the approval delay is about two weeks - that's not bad. Your testing cycle should be longer than that. An extra two weeks should not be a big deal.
I have the same problem if its any consolation, and in my case, it might have been longer than 2 months..
I actually started hammering away at their online contact form for app reviews. After I did that suddenly a few days later it went to "In Review" and then "Preparing for the App Store".
If you have a serious bug fix, there is actually an expedited review service which has a theoretical turn around time of 2 days. I used it twice and the first response was within 12 hours and the second time within 48 hours.
I recently had a game approved and the entire review process took less than 4 days. After it was approved, it took about 6 hours for it to show up in the store.
This was my first app so I figured I'd be waiting at least a few weeks. I was happy (and very surprised) to see it accepted so quickly.
I have no real idea of what causes the varying review times.
oh I've been there and I know how frustrating it is.. Another friend of mine is in the same situation right now. I couldn't believe when my app was approved so fast, but I wanted to share that.
So the app finally got approved just now on the 8th day. I think it was a combination of:
- recently changed google play review process that has created a bottleneck
- my being a new developer, with first app submission
- app had "for families" checked, that probably required additional review steps.
I only hope the release to production will not take as many days!
Speaking from personal experience, their approval process is not lengthy at all. On their site they say 8-10 business days and sure enough I got approved on day 8.
I was at the BB Dev Con last week and their tech lead explained the approval process: "they load it, make sure it doesn't crash the phone, then sign off on it."
Even at some steady state, an app has to come into their queue and be assigned to someone. Each of those folks is probably already busy. And the approval process requires going through all the major features of the app, checking for UI gaffes, profanity, etc.
So even if they had a perfect process, you'd imagine it'd take two or three days.
My app, submitted January 1st, was approved a few hours ago. In developer connection, there was a note saying that approval could take around 2 hours, so this was a nice surprise.
I got a tiny app approved just last week. Total time from submission to acceptance: 33 hours. That's far less than I've seen on the previous three. Luck, or improvement, I'm not sure...
Wait times are so variable. When I started, about 6 months into the iPhone dev being released, we were looking at 2-4 weeks wait time. For a while there it went to 1 week, very fast, then even faster. Now, it is back out to about 1 week.
It had been a couple of years since I last submitted an app until this week. I was amazed. Within 24 hours I'd been rejected (app is UK only so they had some questions as they're testing in the US), had a few back and forth's on the resolution centre (all answered in 1 hour) and I was on the store. I think it was less than 36 hours. Crazy how much better it is. I remember being thrilled when it was 4-5 days (down from 10-14 days) a couple of years ago.
They must have improved the developer approval process and bank contract processing significantly. It took nearly 7 weeks for our bank contracts to get approved, and we used a major int`l bank - Wells Fargo. By the time it was all said and done, our first app took over a month to get on the store.
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