The first app I submitted to the app store back in January was approved in something like 3 days.
As the year went on, that figure went up to around a week, 10-12 days, two weeks, over two weeks.
I have people telling me now that they are experiencing waits of up to 20 days. So my guess is that by the end of the year, we’ll be topping 3 weeks.
Now, I assume that it doesn’t take 3 weeks of testing to see if an app is approvable. In other words, some QA dude doesn’t sit down with it and work on it every day for weeks. Or it doesn’t go through a line of something like 20 people, who each have one day to do their thing with it. And I doubt they do some kind of stress test where they install and run it on a phone and leave it running for a few weeks to see what happens.
My guess is that it takes maybe half an hour to approve or disapprove an app. Maybe more, maybe less. Even if you are ridiculously gracious and say it takes them half a day per app, what accounts for the 3 weeks wait? It’s obvious – there’s a backlog.
So when you submit your app for approval, it goes into a queue. That queue is so damn big that it takes all the Apple approval techs working full time up to three weeks to even getting around to looking at your app.
Backlogs are funny things. Generally, if you have a backlog, it grows. Why? Theoretically, backlogs can either grow, remain the same, or diminish. But if is diminishing, it’s because you are handling things faster than they are coming in and catching up on the backlog. If it is staying the same, it’s because you are handling things at the same rate they are coming in (but not catching up). But the very fact that you have a backlog in the first place indicates that things are coming in faster than you are handling them. So unless you’ve drastically changed how fast you work, or the amount of things coming in drastically reduces, it’s going to continue to grow.
The app approval backlog has steadily grown all this year. That indicates that it’s only going to get worse and worse, because the fact that it is growing shows they are falling behind more and more. Furthermore, the number of overall apps being submitted is increasing. And even worse, every app in the store means potentially several updates, which go through the same approval line. So I predict it’s going to get exponentially worse.
The only solution is to drastically change the way the approval process works. I don’t know how it works, so I can’t particularly say how to improve it. But I hope Apple is doing SOMETHING. At the rate it’s going it’s going to mean multiple month wait times for app approval by some time next year, which is no way to run a business.
+1
And just think what things will be like when all the Flash “developers” start submitting their crap from CS5……
crap or not, increased submissions are not going to help, that’s for sure.
Well, hopefully the Flash CS5 thing won’t be a problem, I still think it has little chance of getting through. Especially with the recent (although unofficial) news that the review staff are now using automated tools (for detecting usage of private API’s). Seems the most logical thing for Apple to do is just block reject anything from the CS5 exporter.
1. The internal review process was actually documented on a blog fairly recently. Last I heard there are roughly 60-70 dedicated reviewers and they spend anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes on a single app submission.
2. 3 weeks is actually not bad, given that 3-4 years ago, via other mobile content “decks”, it would take 3 months to get a mobile app through submission with operators and all their silly processes involved, etc!!! lol. Granted, 3 weeks nowadays is kind of awful for independent developers … and if it turns into 3 months, I imagine developers which seek other avenues. 🙂
3. yes, facepickle, Apple has definitely put an eye on what’s going into the store. Apple likes selling their hardware, and they like building developers
for their overall platform (i.e. OSX). Anything that detracts from that, they are not going to be happy about … 🙂
The easy solution is to just charge for queue jumping. Then it becomes a revenue source, they can hire more people, and the wait of others goes down. It would find its own equilibrium…
“The easy solution is to just charge for queue jumping”
I’m not sure it’s a good idea. If the price is too low, everybody will pay and there will be no change. If the price is too high, only rich people will pay, killing pretty much every indie dev.
There’s no magic solution to this problem. They just need to hire more testers.
The app review process is both frustrating and necessary. I have been waiting patiently for my first submission to get through to the hands of users for about a week. I think they, Apple, are a bit overwhelmed by the success of both the platform and developer submissions. Its a good place for Apple to be, wanted by all, but they still need to court and cater to the development community to ensure they maintain market dominance. Most of us are multi-platform, multi language developers who can just a easily write android, palm or windows mobile software. Don’t get me wrong I am still excited by the iPhone platform, I just think that there are things that Apple should be focusing on that they are not. A real competitor in the mobile market will force them to fix the issues they have.
They desperately need a real competitor.
The lack of a real competitor is part of the reason that flash performs so badly on OSX and Linux.
Its the reason Windows sucked for so long.
Its the reason why the music industry is so shady.
Its the reason that the price of software in general has grown to the point that the risk to potential content creators is almost too high to take.
As long they are the only realistic choice in the marketplace Apple can be complacent. Its not a knock against Apple its just the nature of business in general.
Very well explained Keith!
This is why Apple’s business plan will fail. Unless they ultimately manage to hire every person on the planet to work as QA staff which of course they can’t. The solution of course is: Anarchy! 😉
Speed, as in “time spent approving”, is not the only factor in speed, as in “average time it takes to approve an app”.
Changing the approval process, as in “the way it works” is not the only solution in addressing the backlog. There very well be a more efficient solution, but Apple could eat away at the backlog in the short term by dedicating additional resources to the existing process — additional resources, as in “more reviewers”.
@Subb: I’ve also though of the merits of Apple offering a queue jumping “priority” service. Let’s hope they have too.
@subb…. i think that hiring more people to get apps approved is that magic solution you are talking about.
Additional reviewers is not really a solution. The amount of apps coming in for approval and number of updates needing approval continues to increase, so they really need to continually add new reviewers just to keep the rate of backlog increase roughly linear. They would need a LOT more new reviewers to stop the backlog from increasing at all, and even then would need to continue to increase the numbers of reviewers as the number of submissions rises. It would take a massive effort to actually start to reverse the backlog. If that kind of action was feasible, we wouldn’t continue to see the increase in wait times we are seeing. I predict a major change in the way the whole thing works.
Maybe they should allow “non-approved” applications. For the most part, I’d buy Apple approved apps because I’d assume some higher of integrity than say an open-source or freeware app. Maybe create some tiers, “Apple Certified” for fee, “Apple Approved” for free, but timely approval process for initial release and all updates, and “Non-approved” for free.
Michael, yeah, I’m thinking something along those lines. Either that or they need to seriously automate the process. It’s just not viable to hand qualify that many apps via a one-on-one basis.
good and needed post Keith and i couldn´t agree more to it.
The approval wait times are really getting quite an annoyance and with them increasing more and more would surely soon drive more and more developers away from the apple devices.
As said by other posters waiting several weeks-months for approvals just isn´t feasable at all to many indies and not having to go through something like that was a clear advantage developing for apple´s devices had compared to consoles and other mobiles.
It also severely hampers the motivation of developers to do regular updates and that´s quite sad because free updates are one of the biggest pros of the app store in my eyes.
As a content consumer i´m much more eager to buy something small but with potential to be more on the app store than on the ps3 or wii or ds download services because with the attitude of many app store developers it is much more likely that i´ll get nice free of charge updates to the app on the app store.
As a developer of apps the low entrance/ participation fee and the nice distribution model are key strengths of the app store to me but of course when one has to wait longer and longer to get apps approved while at the same time hearing about more and more people not getting their investment back and getting their apps not approved for partially questionable sounding reasons that´s of course worrying and makes one consider other platforms more.
Like Keith i hope that Apple either gets some more automated testing going or entirely removes the approval process and only lets developers know they have to change something if users complain about the content.
While initially i could see some sense in the approval process in that it could help with raising the quality of apps, meanwhile the wait for approval of not just first releases but also updates of apps is so long that i think this severely lowers the quality many apps could reach.
I know i´d do much more updates to my apps if it wouldn´t take several weeks to get them approved.
@kp, surely adding more reviewers would at the very least help the situation. I can’t imagine it takes that long to actually review one of the apps as they must have tools for that kind of thing. I am sure apple is working on a much better solution, but at least to get through these 2 -4 week wait times, it would be nice.
More and more apps get made so to reduce the approval wait time down to 1-3 days per app Apple would have to hire more and more reviewers over time. Since a lot of smaller or free apps don´t bring apple much or any money it would probably not be financially reasonable to employ as many reviewers as needed to review all apps quickly.
Hence, yeah, the review all apps stance just can´t work out well at all over time.
tomsamson. exactly. However, as I said, “more and more reviewers” are needed just to keep the backlog increasing linearly. Keeping the same amount of reviewers means that the backlog is going to increase even faster than it is. They would have to significantly increase the number of reviewers to start reversing it.
Of course the other factor is that submissions and updates could hit a plateau at some point, or even start declining.
it would be interesting to find out how many people are actually doing reviews and how long it takes them to do each review. If they had to hire 200 more people i don’t think it would be reasonable, but I don’t think they need that many more people. Even if they just hired part time people to handle the simpler apps it would alleviate some of the pain of waiting.
While they may have plenty of free apps that aren’t making apple money, those free apps hold up the line of money making apps so it does end up costing them to some degree by not speeding up the process.
to Jacob: have a look at Scott Janousek´s comment, he listed some nice info.
Hard to tell whether it would cost Apple more to have more reviewers to review everything quickly or whether it costs them more that many apps and their updates are delayed lengthy now and that leads to potentially lower sales than possible and more and more developers loosing interest in developing for iDevices.
Keith brings up the interesting question whether the amount of submissions to the app store could hit a plateau or even start declining.
Sure they could and also will, though i wonder how much of that will be due due to the limitations of the app store and review process.
I´m still excited about the iDevices, developing for them and also the App Store distribution model.
Apple obviously got A LOT of things right there and many contenders are still playing catch up.
On the other side, sadly over time the shortcomings of the system become more and more obvious and Apple runs into the danger of not addressing the main issues quickly enough and may loose many customers of app store content as well as developers who are interested in developing for the app store.
Among my many friends and colleagues who jumped into doing iPhone/ iPod games i see more and more considering moving over to other platforms and in most cases its due to issues they have with getting their apps onto the app store or have them get noticed on the app store or way lower sales than possible.
I think for indies its already the case, even if not discussed that openly on most outlets yet, whether it is without a big publisher or good contacts or a lot of luck possible at all that they make propper money with an app over a longer timespan than a month.
For every indie success story there are thousands of people who don´t make their dev cost investments back.
From experience and what i hear from other developers this is mostly due to such things:
-You submit an app or update for an app and the approval process takes a long timespan, this approval limbo makes it difficult to work on app updates, other projects or promoting the app because how long it will take is totally unclear
-Once your app has passed approval limbo it seems to be a bit about luck and constantly tweaking the release date to actually have the release date of an app be the date it comes out on and not have it be the case that your app comes out and its release date is already in the past and the app is never listed among the new apps
-Apps by big publishers often seem to get a spot in the new and noteworthy or other apple promoted categories automatically and right away while for smaller apps it often only happens after a while, for a short while or not at all
-In general some apps get the luck of getting featured in tv spots, apple promotion or getting a custom sales page on the app store while the majority without those options of course have way lower chances for selling that well.
-Due to the signing and protection mechanisms apps for the iDevices are extremely easy to rip and spread around and there are many stories about people getting 10 times more players who ripped an app and are playing it than legit bough copy using players.
Without something changing there small indies for whom every single sale counts are usually those who get hit hardest by piracy.
I hope apple addresses these and other problems in the next few months because having more equal chances on the app store and overall less overhead on all fronts would make the iDevice and App Store development and distribution ways stay attractive, and man would i like to develop way more and more bigger things for these devices if i wouldn´t have to fear i probably never make my dev costs back 🙂
Actually, isn’t piracy going to be a MAJOR issue for the Flash based apps (if they ever get approved)?
One crack will fit all, as unless I am mistaken there is no way for ActionKiddieScript to check the bundle, or perform any type of anti-piracy measures. ( I am aware that nothing is 100% secure, but custom anti-piracy measures will deter the script kiddies and automated tools long enough to hopefully get an initial sales base, if you’re pirated from day.week one you are pretty screwed!).
Interesting…… I bet Adobe won’t be putting that on the bullet list 🙂
hey facepickle,
we´ve talked about flash to iPhone pros and cons in various other posts and while i don´t disagree with the stated concern and think its cool to discuss it when that´s the actual topic this blog post is centered around something else so why not stay more on topic?
okay fair point, KP can you move that comment if it’s causing concern!