We get asked a lot of questions about Apple’s app review process. One of the most common questions we get is “How long does it take for an app to be reviewed?”. Our answer: “Not as long as you think”.
When we first submitted Discovr to Apple for review, we had no idea how long the review process was going to take. In fact, we spent the next day and night hitting our iTunes Connect account every few minutes hoping for some news. Would we make it through review?
Then, all of a sudden the status of our app switched to “in review” and we were away. Several hours later, it had been reviewed, then approved, and was finally ready for sale. In all, it took less than two days from submitting our app to being released to the public.
In fact, the review process was so fast that we weren’t actually ready for it. We didn’t even have a website up. (I’m pretty sure I remember putting together a dodgy website at 3am that night so that we had somewhere for people to check out what we were doing).
Ok, so two days to get approved. Nice one. I’d say we just got lucky. Well it actually turns out that Apple’s app review team has consistently been reviewing apps more quickly than previously reported. We’ve now had several versions of Discovr go through the app review cycle, so the the data are getting a little more useful. Here’s the breakdown of the total time taken for each of our versions to go from being submitted to being approved:
Version 1.0. Approval time: 2 days
Version 1.1. Approval time: 1 day
Version 1.2. Approval time: 3 days
Version 1.3. Approval time: 7 days
Version 1.4. Approval time: 5 days
Version 1.5. Approval time: 0.5 days
All up, our average approval time has been 3.16 days.
Our most recent version has been the fastest so far. We submitted it at about 9pm last Thursday, and it sat waiting for review until we went to bed.
Incredibly, we woke up on Friday morning to see that it had already been approved and was ready for release.
Apple’s review team are on fire. That took less than 12 hours to be reviewed and approved.
I think this is all part of a bigger push from Apple. They’ve taken huge steps to make their review process more transparent and more efficient than ever before: Developers can now view the App Store review guidelines in detail so you know what you can and can’t do. Developers can login at any time and view the status of their apps. Perhaps most significantly, the average review time has dropped dramatically from 3-4 weeks, to the current average of 1-2 weeks.
We’re hearing reports of very fast review times from other app developers across the globe. What have you heard about Apple’s review process lately?
I’ve submitted my app 8 days ago and it took 7 days to go over to “in review”. Until now its still not approved. I’m getting nervous by now.
I think the review teams have been busy with all the retina iPad updates. We had several updates in the queue that took longer than usual, and then all of a sudden they were approved. You can also try expediting your review if you meet the criteria. We’re finding it typically takes around a week for a new app to be approved and a few days for an update to be approved. Generally I’d say they are pretty fast.
Great article : )
Hmm first time i had to wait 8 days before going into in review status.. After 4 hours it was rejected.
Second te I had to wait for 11 days before going in review… Now i’m still waiting ;)