The iPhone App Store Approval Line is Doomed
The first app I submitted to the app store back in January was approved in something like 3 days.
As the year went on, that figure went up to around a week, 10-12 days, two weeks, over two weeks.
I have people telling me now that they are experiencing waits of up to 20 days. So my guess is that by the end of the year, we’ll be topping 3 weeks.
Now, I assume that it doesn’t take 3 weeks of testing to see if an app is approvable. In other words, some QA dude doesn’t sit down with it and work on it every day for weeks. Or it doesn’t go through a line of something like 20 people, who each have one day to do their thing with it. And I doubt they do some kind of stress test where they install and run it on a phone and leave it running for a few weeks to see what happens.
My guess is that it takes maybe half an hour to approve or disapprove an app. Maybe more, maybe less. Even if you are ridiculously gracious and say it takes them half a day per app, what accounts for the 3 weeks wait? It’s obvious – there’s a backlog.
So when you submit your app for approval, it goes into a queue. That queue is so damn big that it takes all the Apple approval techs working full time up to three weeks to even getting around to looking at your app.
Backlogs are funny things. Generally, if you have a backlog, it grows. Why? Theoretically, backlogs can either grow, remain the same, or diminish. But if is diminishing, it’s because you are handling things faster than they are coming in and catching up on the backlog. If it is staying the same, it’s because you are handling things at the same rate they are coming in (but not catching up). But the very fact that you have a backlog in the first place indicates that things are coming in faster than you are handling them. So unless you’ve drastically changed how fast you work, or the amount of things coming in drastically reduces, it’s going to continue to grow.
The app approval backlog has steadily grown all this year. That indicates that it’s only going to get worse and worse, because the fact that it is growing shows they are falling behind more and more. Furthermore, the number of overall apps being submitted is increasing. And even worse, every app in the store means potentially several updates, which go through the same approval line. So I predict it’s going to get exponentially worse.
The only solution is to drastically change the way the approval process works. I don’t know how it works, so I can’t particularly say how to improve it. But I hope Apple is doing SOMETHING. At the rate it’s going it’s going to mean multiple month wait times for app approval by some time next year, which is no way to run a business.
