Average Wait Time for Mac App Store App Reviews Rising Significantly

I had an application submitted September 1st. On September 28th it finally got into the review status and on the 4th of October it was accepted. I was somewhat patient but it sure took a long time and made me wondering what other possibilities there are. Well, now at least people seem to like the application.

But due to the liking, I already know that I will submit an update within the next days/weeks. So it's the same story all over again.

The problem with the long review process is not so much a problem of waiting for an app to be approved but to be stuck with development because if finally, the application turns out to be rejected, you need to fix issues in a version which is already outdated because you have created one or two dot-releases in the meantime.

You can however try to submit the next version. But they will not like that. Got a warning once. I tried to submit a non-sandboxed app and got rejected. As I had no interest in spending hours reading all the stuff, I simply ignored the rejection and was working on the next version. Few weeks later I submitted the next version (now with sandboxing) and got a message that this is not intended to be done like that. Got it approved nonetheless. So thanks.

In my opinion, the whole submission process is too cryptic. Not straight-forward at all.

petsounds said:

A company with $100B in the bank should not have this problem. Apple seems to have a number of internal mismanagement issues. Of course there's a smaller thing to note -- Apple makes relatively little revenue from their app stores, so they don't have much financial incentive to make sure the stores run smoothly. They know the Google app store is no competition for developers right now. But it's no excuse, because ultimately it harms users as much as it does the developers they buy from.

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Money has nothing to do with it. You can't throw $20 billion dollar at a problem and expect it to fix the problem immediately, there isn't any price point that could fix all the problems with the App Stores. Apple has to take it slow and fix it at the core and that means a solid engineering team to tackle it, not 10K people working on all parts of it, that can make it far worse than you'd think it'd help.

Apple itself is relatively a small company, they only have ~25K non-retail employees.

Microsoft by comparison has 100K employees with more R&D employees than the entire Apple's fleet (~36K).

Hopefully, Apple'll fix the problem and bring back the native app experience with faster performance.

I think the real problem is that Apple thought that opening a Mac App Store would interest current iOS developers aswell, which just isn't the case. Universal apps for iOS/Mac would have been announced with Mountain Lion, and Game Center would have been the whole one thing on all of them, and not separate Mac/iOS achievement systems.

It isn't worth Apple's time to push out apps that lack quality control, and that's pretty much most of the Mac App Store. When you have to also review 10 of the same word processors, reminder applications, and picture editors, and they come every week, why would you even bother? Most of them don't even sell one copy.

You can say that the lack of processing of reviews is due to iOS6, but it's probably not even that. The Mac App Store is simply not interesting.

camnchar said:

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.

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I don't see how that would effect MAC app store apps, which the article is on.

Consumers don't care about updates. They just want the best experience that the App Store provides in obtaining the best software for the world's most powerful operating system.

Jessica Lares said:

When you have to also review 10 of the same word processors, reminder applications, and picture editors, and they come every week, why would you even bother? Most of them don't even sell one copy.

You can say that the lack of processing of reviews is due to iOS6, but it's probably not even that. The Mac App Store is simply not interesting.

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Thank god you're not running my company! Have you not heard the term: Assumptions are the mother of all fu** ups!

Basic Problem? New programming changes

Sandboxing is not an easy demand to make of developers. As well, a fair number of new iCloud touches, the prohibition of certain kinds of upselling, etc., these all have an impact on how long you have to wait for approval. The app must make a request on opening for enumerated access to a, b, and c, and nothing else. Then the reviewer has to use the app to make sure nothing's going on in the background undeclared.

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Jessica Lares said:

I think the real problem is that Apple thought that opening a Mac App Store would interest current iOS developers aswell, which just isn't the case. Universal apps for iOS/Mac would have been announced with Mountain Lion, and Game Center would have been the whole one thing on all of them, and not separate Mac/iOS achievement systems.

It isn't worth Apple's time to push out apps that lack quality control, and that's pretty much most of the Mac App Store. When you have to also review 10 of the same word processors, reminder applications, and picture editors, and they come every week, why would you even bother? Most of them don't even sell one copy.

You can say that the lack of processing of reviews is due to iOS6, but it's probably not even that. The Mac App Store is simply not interesting.

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1. I'm extremely skeptical that a Universal iOS/Mac app was ever contemplated.
2. Apple is largely making sure the app sandboxes and plays nice with iCloud. That it isn't upgrading outside of the app store, and the other things they ask from developers. If they got into esthetics, imagine the uproars. As long as they cut down the number of crashing apps, and apps that do sneaky things behind your back, they're happy.

Wow. Someone needs to hire some more reviewers.

zorinlynx said:

Apple really should "permanently approve" trusted developers once they prove they are trustworthy, allowing app updates to go out without each one having to be approved.

App makers who frequently release bugged updates can lose their "trusted" status. It's not hard!

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I should add that Transmit took over a month to approve the last update. This is a $35 app, too, so it's not a money issue.

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Sure, until that trusted dev is compromised and the whole iOS and Mac eco system gets hit hard. Imagine what would happen if Rovio is hacked for example.

As soon as they do automatic approval they open a giant back door into their system. Yes sure, they can do a virus scanner like Google has for the play store but will it catch everything?

That said I think Apple will do this eventually, Apps review is a never ending tasks and with the number of random apps being submitted it is any surprise the wait time will increase? It's not exactly a easily scalable system as it is rather labour intensive. That has always been the downside to how Apple operates the app store.

That's why I haven't got any app updates for some days. But the sandboxing stuff has made the Mac App Store pretty useless IMO. Some of my favorite apps quitted the MAS due to this.

Pressure Drop said:

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.

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If you have an urgent reason to expedite your review process, you can make an appeal to Apple. When Battery Status was #4 in Paid Utilities, I had an update that made it so the app no longer worked under Snow Leopard (I only have two Macs, one runs Lion, the other runs Mountain Lion, so I didn't notice during testing that I'd accidentally dropped support for Snow Leopard.) So I was buried under about 1K emails from upset customers (not exaggerating. I woke up with over 200 unread emails and ended up with another 50/hour for about 24 hours.) Anyways, it was a quick (6 line) patch to restore compatibility with Snow Leopard. I sent an email to Tim Cook, who then redirected me to Apple's expedite review process that they don't advertise particularly well.

Anyways, here's the link if you need it: https://developer.apple.com/appstore/contact/appreviewteam/index.html

koolmagicguy said:

I don't see how that would effect MAC app store apps, which the article is on.

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Sorry, I forgot Apple is an infinitely large company.

I'm a new Mac developer. My experience has been frustrating.

- Apple documentation is very good, but there has been many changes to the platform that are not reflected on it. You'll find a lot of sample code with and without @synthesize, without ARC and calling old API's, such as QTKit instead of AVFoundation. That's not really good for new developers.

- Sandboxing and receipt validation are challenging topics poorly covered by Apple. Open console and see dozens of messages for which there is absolutely no explanation on Apple docs or forums. After ML 10.8.2 update (after my app was approved) the console started showing a sandbox error related to my login helper. Can't find an answer for that.

- In-app store (for Mac), test user management and purchase control is another nightmare. There is no purchase reset. For every purchase test you need to create a new test user (with a valid email that can't be an Apple ID). So, for hundreds of tests, create hundreds of gmail accounts and add them to iTunes Connect. What a shame.

- We can't search for known bugs and make sure that an error message is not related to our app. Rdar is a post-only system. I have filed bugs and after 45 days they are still "open", with absolutely no indication of what has been done.

- Their developer forums are a joke with few questions and no answers. I have tried it in vain. No answer. And there is no place to run to if you have urgent problems. Not even an email address dedicated to developer questions.

- My first app, Did I Click, took 28 days on the "Waiting for Review" status. I asked for an expedited review but it was declined (and I heard you got 2 per year). It was launched in September (before the iOS6 and maps-gate).

- The day after the app launch a user posted some suggestions which I promptly attended. Submitted the update right away. It's been 22 days and it is still on "Waiting for Review". I can't even tell the user I have done the update.

- I have just submitted my second app and am not expecting it to be on sale in less than a month. And after two months of testing I'm praying to God there is no bug on it.

My general feeling is that Apple does not really care about developers. They care about consumers. Developers are just part of their ecosystem with the purpose of attracting consumer's attention to a platform with a variety of apps.

The worst thing is we, as developers, can't make mistakes. Let alone be proactive and try to keep user satisfaction. With any code change taking 30 days to deploy, we are limited to having a very stable app with only 2 to 3 updates a year.

markcres said:

There is nothing worse than a graph Y axis that has no units stated on it !

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that be days my friend, days, there are way worse things

Sacird said:

.......... sh**!!

post PC era it looks like. Although whoever went full retard and started that phrase doesnt realize there is no such thing. Only a pre PC era.

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I agree 100%. The iPad is a PC. So post PC would be post iPad.

This graph looks like Ohio

I imagine a large amount of this is down to many apps all being updated at the same time for iOS6 and more recently for the iPhone5's larger screen. I have definitely seen a huge increase with the number of updates I am getting from the app store in the past few months. It remains to be seen if this is a consistent trend or if it will fall back towards the end of the year.

CheesePuff said:

Coda from Panic is at version 2.0.4 now. The Mac App Store has 2.0.2 listed as the current version and it's been that way for 4 weeks. Still no 2.0.3 update, and when that does post it will still be a version behind. This is ridiculous.

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Perhaps somebody has already mentioned this (I can't be bothered to check the whole thread), but Panic said that they withdrew 2.0.3 from the MAS review queue and submitted 2.0.4 in its place, so when it is actually approved by Apple the App Store version should finally have parity with the Panic-distributed version.

Unless they've released 2.0.5 (or 6 or 7 or...) by the time such a blue moon comes around!

khomsanph said:

My app, EasyGet Download Manager,
is currently waiting for review.
I submit it on Oct 2.
Last update on July take 3 weeks.
One month is too long.
Especially when you have bug fixed release.

Sorry if this seem like promoting my app.
To be honest, I just registered with macrumors for the purpose of promoting my app.
By posting useful information here in exchange for ads space (signature).
Hey, then I found this thread come up.
Am I lucky?

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Shame on you. SHame on you.

Review time for iOs apps has also gone insane! Or apps have gone from 3-4 days to now 1-2 weeks for just an update to be reviewed. They either need more reviewers or shorter test bucket!

The graph is pretty accurate, despite the small sample size

As someone else pointed out, there are fewer mac devs than you might think - and far fewer good ones (i.e. not putting out crap).

I can attest to the graph being quite accurate - I have an app that has been waiting for review for about 3 weeks now with no updates yet.

.

petsounds said:

A company with $100B in the bank should not have this problem. Apple seems to have a number of internal mismanagement issues. Of course there's a smaller thing to note -- Apple makes relatively little revenue from their app stores, so they don't have much financial incentive to make sure the stores run smoothly. They know the Google app store is no competition for developers right now. But it's no excuse, because ultimately it harms users as much as it does the developers they buy from.

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Apple has the app store not for making money but to sell hardware. Same as iTunes doesn't make money on songs but relies on sale of iPods.

Its these little apps that made the iPhone an household name. So irrespective of the revenue they should keep the apps flowing smoothly.There are a lot more windows developers than Apple developers and once they get frustrated and the developer community starts embracing the windows phone, its game over for Apple.

Mr. Milk said:

I'm a new Mac developer. My experience has been frustrating. [...]

- In-app store (for Mac), test user management and purchase control is another nightmare. There is no purchase reset. For every purchase test you need to create a new test user (with a valid email that can't be an Apple ID). So, for hundreds of tests, create hundreds of gmail accounts and add them to iTunes Connect. What a shame.

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I thought I was the only one that noticed this!

The test system is atrocious and iTunes Connect must literally be choked with millions of abandoned email addresses that were used once to test a purchase, never to be used again.