16 weeks to get my iPhone app approved. Guess I was doing it wrong. Here's my advice. | Hacker News Reader

16 weeks to get my iPhone app approved. Guess I was doing it wrong. Here's my advice.

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35 pointstimburks11 comments

It took us four weeks and four rejections to get Borange approved.

The back and forth via email with the App Store people moved at a snail's pace. The most helpful thing was for us to call Apple developer relations people and discuss our issues, despite that developer relations people have no involvement with the approval process.

I heard recently that there a 10 people at Apple working to approve 700 apps a day, including new apps and updates.

Does the time depend on the category you are posting to?

I got a productivity webapp approved in one week last July.

I will be posting another finance app to the app store but I don't expect huge delays because its not in the hugely popular game section.

Am I wrong?

No, I think you're right. There seem to be separate queues for different categories.

webapp is usually easier than real apple app which may have the potential to crash the whole iphone OS.

I've never heard that web apps require approval. Probably a typo? Also, it would be nearly impossible to "crash the whole iphone OS." An app runs in a sandbox, the worst thing it could crash is itself.

No typo, timburks.

Before the app store debut around July 2007, web apps was the only way to develop for the iphone.

With Webapps, Apple simply place your application on their http://www.apple.com/webapps page and gives you a chance to promote yourself.

Apple does not seem to promote those web apps as much as they should.

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.

I suspect that the amount of content that ships with the app is a factor: all text, images, sounds, etc. presumably have to be reviewed. I've never dealt with the iPhone app submission process, but you have a similarly arduous validation process with video game consoles. Except they've been doing it for decades so they've probably smoothed out more of the kinks.

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.

I was hoping for advice about specific issues. For example, don't have a picture of an iPhone in your logo (or anything else Apple trademarked). Any other specific issues people have run into?

My (twitter related) app was approved in 5 days. The following update in 2 days. I had expected worse, so I was pleasantly surprised.

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