iOS developer training firm Shiny Development has been tracking review times for iOS and Mac App Store submissions for some time, crowdsourcing data from developers disclosing their waits in Tweets. The tools provide an interesting look at how review times have varied over time, and they reveal that there has been a substantial increase in those times for Mac App Store submissions over the past six months.
Shiny Development's annual trend graph for Mac apps shows average review times of a few days to a week through approximately April 1 of this year, after which time the trend began a fairly steady rise. That rise has accelerated in recent weeks, with developer reports now indicating that their apps are spending an average of nearly a month in review.
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The sample size is admittedly small for Shiny Development's Mac App Store calculations, with 62 reports having been collected over the past 30 days, but the firm reports that the data is generally fairly indicative of broader trends in their experience.
The averages on this site are based only on the data gathered from Twitter which are a very small subset of the total number of apps which go through review each day. However in our experience it does give a reasonable indication of how review times are changing over time.
The trend for iOS apps is less severe and is based on more substantial data as would be expected for the larger iOS App Store, with 471 data points being included from the past 30 days. Average iOS App Store review times have been within a range of 3-11 days over the past year and currently sit at one week after declining from their peak roughly two months ago.
Developers interested in contributing to the project can find tweet their waiting times using the respective #iosreviewtime and #macreviewtime hashtags, and Shiny Development offers a few guidelines on how times should be calculated.
Top Rated Comments
Several Apps I've bought via the App Store have gone through three and four updates in the real world, but still no updates showing up in the App Store. Very frustrating; I thought updates would at least get a bit of a fast track. No wonder users and developers are getting fed up.
Speaking as a developer with a number of apps in the Mac App Store, the graph EXACTLY matches our recent experience. The last few updates we've submitted have taken more than 3 weeks to even enter the review process.
It's actually pretty frustrating when you're trying to push an update (or bug fix) out to users and you have to wait WEEKS for Apple to get around to reviewing your app.
I don't know if Apple is understaffed or getting inundated with new apps, but they've got to do something to improve the situation. Spend a few of those billions of $ and hire some more reviewers. After all, they're taking 30% of all app sales, so one would expect a little faster service.
Tough to draw any conclusions from such a small sample size, but maybe Apple should hire more reviewers for the 6 months surrounding a new iOS release.
Nice job reading! This is about the Mac App Store....
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But I want Tweetbot *now*.
That was my first thought as well :)