Mac App Store taking two months to review my app (video) | Hacker News Reader

Mac App Store taking two months to review my app (video)

darkheartfelt.com

23 pointsdarkheartfelt17 comments

This seems like a fairly common thing right now - I've got an update for my app that has been waiting to be reviewed for several weeks now, and lots of others have been reporting waiting times close to a month. Prior to this summer, wait times were usually around a week.

Hopefully it is just a temporary slowdown due to Mountain Lion causing a bunch of new app submissions, and not indicative of long-term staffing reductions.

Yeah well it's not conducive to making software in an agile way and if releases are going to take two months to be approved and then probably rejected, I'm looking at 1/4 year tacked onto already lengthy scopes. That's a fiscal quarter someone blew, or one tenth of someone's daughter's life. Not to mention I totally lost my "updated for Mountain Lion" and "updated for Retina" feature chances. It's not something want to accept as "common"! I'd like to have a daughter someday.

Same thing on the iOS App Store. I submitted a new app which took 12 days to go in review. It was rejected for a valid reason (I was saving temp data in Documents/). The fix took 20 minutes to implement but I'll likely have to wait another 12 days.

I wish Apple had a system similar to Debian's lintian which would look into your code and gave your warnings for bad stuff.

Similar to my app also, submitted app to iOS App Store took 11 days to go in review, then took 17 days to be accepted to the app store.

Yeah well it doesn't take 2 months just to get a response on iOS. There's a huge disparity between the review times.

We have experienced similar wait times, 13 days for the last one, and we got rejected for a valid reason as well... It's just frustrating to have to wait that long when it took just a few days a couple of months ago.

I really wonder what could have happened recently to have review times jump from 7 days to 13...

In my experience, being "in review" for a very long time means that something in your app has triggered an internal discussion. Since it's internal, it's entirely opaque to you. Imagine that there is a group of people wrangling their schedules to meet a few times and talk about your app, if it helps. It might even be true.

But aside from that possibility, I know that iOS review times have grown lengthy due to the huge number of apps being readied for the iOS 6 / iPhone 5 release. Pure speculation on my part, but I guess it's possible that Mac app reviewers have been temporarily reallocated to iOS app reviews.

In my experience, being "in review" for a very long time means that something in your app has triggered an internal discussion.

This!

My first iOS app for my previous startup got stuck in the review process for almost a month. In the end, Apple's review team called me about some clarifications. Turned out, they were trying to decide whether they wanted to approve some of the things our app was doing. After a couple of calls, they approved it.

For my current startup, we've again been stuck in the review process for almost a month. I can see from our logs that different reviewers have tried the app over the last month. Yesterday, Apple's review team informed me that they need to talk to me about the app. Let's see what the hold-up is this time.

In any case, I'm just glad that they reach out to us to resolve the issues/get clarifications instead of just rejecting the apps.

Counter example: My Mac App Store App (MiniTune) update took 9 days to get in to review and three hours to review two weeks ago. They did take three weeks for the previous release, about 6 months ago.

It's a simple app though.

I once got into the iOS app store in 2 hours, it was the first time I was sending an app to the store and it was in 2012. So don't count on anything. App Store may come out and ruin all your plans.

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.

Yeah I already had to use expedited reviews for another app earlier this year. I think you only get two a year.

I'll try and contact a bit more but it's not something I had on my long list of things to do. Also I have traded back and forth with them earlier this year when an approved app wasn't appearing even when you searched for it by name. It's tiring and it feels under-resourced.

Just because sometimes posts like this that make the front-page of major social sites get taken as gospel, I'd like to add that all 3 of my iOS games took about 14 days to get reviewed, and approved within ~48 hours. They are mostly simple games and I don't do anything out of the ordinary. It didn't seem unreasonable at all to me.

Again, @dpcan that's a different app store.

@op - I think your video would be heaps better served with some simple software like http://www.techsmith.com/ which actually demo's the app ? Wouldn't take you long to actually show what it does ?

Thanks I will definitely check that out. App demo and Kickstarter coming soon.

There's some free stuff for mac - http://www.techsmith.com/download/camtasia/default.asp - 30 day trial and so on

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