Get apps through approval faster – Apple’s New Year’s resolution
One of the biggest gripes we have heard references to the developers of iPhone in 2009, is that it took forever to make their apps through the approval process iTunes App Store . Often apps would be disapproved for seemingly illogical reasons after a long wait in the approval queue, and TUAW heard from more than one developer that had just given up.
iTunes Connect, the portal through which developers submit iPhone apps and check sales, was down between December 23 to 28, 2009. Since then, TUAW has received a number of positive emails from iPhone developers indicating that Apple iPhone has taken a decision to increase Apps in 2010.
How fast are few apps making it through the process? Take developer Aaron Douglas’s free Migraine Diary [iTunes Link]; he submitted it on 28 December at 9 PM CT and received notice of the approval a 4 PM CT on the 31 December — that’s less than three days.
But this is quite slow compared to what Yuri, a developer at Atomic Cactus, experienced:
I am a developer who is behind Atomic Cactus, we have 3 games currently in the app store, and they all took approximately 2-3 weeks to get approved. Today at 4:00 am I submitted for approval our latest app, which is not exactly a “fart app” (it’s a pretty polished puzzle game with OpenFeint). As of 1:30 pm today, the app is in the app store.
It is nine and a half hours, guys! This is a small sampling of the many emails we’ve received from developers since just after Christmas.
If this is due to a New Year’s resolution, competition from the Android platform, or a new back-end system for processing apps, it is a welcome change for iPhone developers and users alike.
