Apple's Priority Queue

I'm kind of tired of bring this up, as I'm sure others are tired of the same sort of comments, but the App Store has been bothering me quite a bit lately. This doesn't seem like the way things should work. We shouldn't be spending time thinking up clever and logical explanations of what hoops Apple puts the very developers that make its platform interesting through.

Am I wrong? I don't (yet) write iPhone apps, and I am honestly seeking sane opinions of those who do.

As a student, I am currently learning everything I can about everything that goes on my computer and how it works, and realizing that almost nothing I currently know would be possible without all the open-source tools that are used in every one of our courses (none of the lab machines in the CS department here run Windows). The very core idea of being able to tinker and learn about each moving part of software, like a mechanism made of semi-transparent gears, is what attracted me personally into the industry in the first place. Developers' ideas seem to only be guided by what they are able to dream up and code, and anyone can participate and improve things collaboratively creating something beautiful and useful.

And now I'm learning that one of the supposedly more exciting ways to make a living using the acquired knowledge is to do things in very particular restricted ways, according to the rules set out by one company, using the tools they deemed fit. Perhaps I'm overdramatizing, but there is just something very fishy about the entire concept, and I can't tell whether my confusion stems from lack of knowledge, the fact that I'm looking at it from a fresh point of view that others are just too deep in the trenches to see, or both.

I've self rejected an app that was in the top 20 of a category many times. I can't even think of a time we submitted an update that we didn't self reject at least once. This app still gets much quicker review times for updates than another app which is much less popular.

I guess I'd like to see more than "here's how i think it works" and instead some explanation as to why this guy thinks it works how he thinks.

I'd add this: when you receive the "your app needs more time to review" email, it seems like your app is bumped into a "needs supervisor approval" queue.

In my experience, it takes up to 24 hours for Apple Developer Relations to call you and explain the cause of the hold up.

I've seen this multiple times and it's always for some specific situations that are not explicitly covered in the guidelines - i.e. they need further clarification about copyright ownership, or maybe they just need to explain what needs to be changed in order to pass their review.

We ran a website that let users create their own iPhone apps so bugfixes to the platform required 55+ apps to be rebuilt and resubmitted at the same time. Emails for all 55 apps would come in at the same time every time they changed state (30 or so seconds to receive all 55) and was very consistent through all of our updates.

FWIW, some more anecdotal evidence

1) after the switch to 4.0, updates to my apps that added background audio and support for the high res screen were through in 2 days. during this same period, normal bug fixes took around 12 calendar days

2) just updating images and names can take upwards of 3 weeks for non-popular apps (you think it'd be the opposite)

Sometimes its fast, other times its not. Its usually consistent, but sometimes they mess up. Thats all we know for sure.

FWIW, my experience is app reviews take the same amount of time -- a week, plus or minus two days. This is regardless of if the submission is of a new app or an update for an existing one. Recent update, fixing something that caused a rejection or the first update in a few months.