The main problem I see with the App Store, is the flood of totally crap games and software. Having those screened out, would make things better for everyone and reduce waiting times. I can give you 2 examples (BIG ones) of crap I saw in the past days: - a totally BS simple game being sold for $99.99 (to induce the user in error that the game costs $0.99) - a totally BS application having the name "iDracula" (exactly the name of the highly succesfull and polished game) ... to capitalize on it's success. Things like this will slowly turn the App Store in nothing more than a garbage bin.
I hope they hire a huge team of people to screen. Quality games aren't being recognized through the app store due to the other crap that floods the listings.
If I give you a list of 10.000 games, out of which 2 are GREAT and 9998 are CRAP ... how do you find the 2 great games? It's impossible.
I'll be interested to know how long it will take for my game to be reviewed and released. I had to revoke and resubmit my game last night around 1AM after a little extra tweaking and small bug fixes I found in the original submission. Let the countdown begin!
Submitted an update on the 30th, approved on the 7th. It seems they are back to a normal schedule. It was proably just a flood of 3.0 compliance updates which clogged the system for awhile. -ddn
SpeedR was just accepted into the app store. Looks like a 2 week turn-around for that. Still waiting on the patch for vipValet Lite.
I used to make Flash games before I decided to get into iPhone dev, and I was one of the first people on this community called Kongregate.com, where users are encouraged to make and upload their own flash games. So I got to see this phenomenon first hand. At first, there was a small community of experienced developers and most (if not all) of the games were really high-quality. Then, gradually the flood of newbie devs and crappy one-off games started, and the forums and new games section was overwhelmed. Of course the overall community got a boost from the new users (for better or worse), but it wasn't the same friendly crowd of developers, and if they were there, I lost sight of them in the flood. Kongregate solved the problem of too many bad games because the good ones are picked out and featured on the front page, and they're also ranked by rating (1-5 star). So, my point is, Apple can't really stop the flood of crappy apps. It's going to happen anyway. The thing they can do, though, is improve the ranking and featuring system so the quality apps rise to the top of the heap. EDIT: Sorry for going a little off-topic here
My app also took around two weeks to get approved, this was during the 3.0 update. I had heard that updates were taking even longer.
14 days so far for our latest-submitted app. We did get an email after 2/3 days saying Although according to google this message might be about something else and not just slow submission review...
My game was just under two weeks. I'm using pinch analytics in my game and noticed that someone played my game twice, 2 days after I submitted it, then once 3 days later. It was then another 6 days before it was ready for sale. Would love to know what the process for application review at Apple entails.
It's corporate.. there's always red tape and a long process. What I'm guessing is the review process has a daily update per step. Everyday, an X amount of applications are processed through a step. If you're not in that X amount of applications, you have to wait until the next day for the next batch. With a ton of apps being submitted, you can see how that could get backed up quick.
It's getting better. Last Pocket God Update came out July 3rd, 2009. Latest July 9th, 2009. Less then a week.
Sorry to bring back an oldish thread, we submitted our binary on the 29th of june and still not been accepted/rejected yet... has anyone else had to wait this long (18 days) lately? Maybe time to email apple...
We are submitting our debut app, iFist tomorrow, very interested to see how long this takes! I am expecting no less than a week - if it takes more than 10 days I won't be too anxious. Two weeks+ and my eyebrows will begin to furrow...! I will update in here for the other noobs like myself to be able to gauge from this POV (and much thanks to the others who have posted on their progress!)
My last Stick Escape update (if came out 2 days ago) took 9 days. I submitted the next one already and I am hoping for the same results.