Category: Apple

Apple

How long does Apple take to approve an app?

So exactly 1 week after we received the “Waiting for Review” email from Apple, we received the “In Review” notification.

The review of our Outskirts Press Free Publishing app took 4 hours and 38 minutes.  At 4:38 in the afternoon on Tuesday, one week after submitting it, we received the following notice from Apple:

Dear Outskirts Press,

The status for the following app has changed to Processing for App Store.

App Name: Outskirts Press Free Publishing App
App Version Number: X.XXXXX
App SKU: 01
App Apple ID: XXXXXXX

To make changes to this app, sign in to iTunes Connect and open the Manage Your Applications module.

If you have any questions regarding your app, click Contact Us in iTunes Connect.

Regards,

The iTunes Store Team

And then, 21 minutes later, we received this notice:

Dear Outskirts Press,

The following app has been approved. The status has changed to Ready for Sale.

If your contracts are not in effect at this time, however, your app status will be Pending Contract. You may track the progress of your contracts in the Contracts, Tax, and Banking module in iTunes Connect.

Note that it may take up to 24 hours before your app is live on the App Store. This delay is dependent upon any app availability issues.

App Name: Outskirts Press Free Publishing App
App Version Number: X.XXXXXX
App SKU: 01
App Apple ID:XXXXXXX

To make changes to this app, sign in to iTunes Connect and open the Manage Your Applications module.

If you have any questions regarding your app, click Contact Us in iTunes Connect.

Sincerely,

The iTunes Store Team

 

Apple

App approval time

For a new application, from a new developer (us), our “Waiting for Review” status lasted a week, to the day, so this gives other developers a good idea of what they can expect when they submit their first application. Apple doesn’t give you any indication of how long anything takes, so you don’t know whether to set your expectations for “an hour” or “a day” or “a week” or “a month.”

Last Tuesday, when we first uploaded the app we received the “Waiting for Upload” status notification, followed shortly thereafter by the “Waiting for Review” status notification.

Then …. nothing… for days…

Then,  yesterday, the following Tuesday after we uploaded the app,  at 10am, we received the following notification:

Dear Outskirts Press,

The status for the following app has changed to In Review.

App Name: Outskirts Press Free Publishing App
App Version Number: X.xxxxx
App SKU: 01
App Apple ID:XXXXXXXX

To make changes to this app, sign in to iTunes Connect and open the Manage Your Applications module.

If you have any questions regarding your app, click Contact Us in iTunes Connect.

Regards,

The iTunes Store Team

At 4:38pm on the same Tuesday, we received the next notice, which I’ll discuss tomorrow.

Apple

Waiting for app approval

With step one of the Apple app review process complete — which I discussed last time — we uploaded the app via the Manage Applications portion of our iTunes Connect Account. And in doing so, received the following email notification from Apple, a mere 16 minutes after the first notification:

Dear Outskirts Press,

The status for the following app has changed to Waiting For Review.

App Name: Outskirts Press Free Publishing App
App Version Number: X.XXXXX
App SKU: 01
App Apple ID: XXXXXXX

To make changes to this app, sign in to iTunes Connect and open the Manage Your Applications module.

If you have any questions regarding your app, click Contact Us in iTunes Connect.

Regards,

The iTunes Store Team

Apple apparently hasn’t learned an important fact about email marketing – people don’t read emails, they browse them.  The emails look nearly identical, and could easily be mistaken for duplicates. The only difference is that instead of “Waiting for Upload” the status is now “Waiting for Review.”

And that’s where we still are. We received that email on Tuesday, June 23.   And you’ll notice the app isn’t actually “Under Review” yet; it is “Waiting for Review.”  I suspect we will receive another notification when the review process has actually begun… and then we will be able to proceed with this topic.

 

Apple

Apple app review process

Once you have your app “build” and are happy with how it performs on your testing device, you upload it to the Apple App Store.  You do this by logging-into your iTunes Connect account at http://itunesconnect.apple.com and clicking on Manage Applications.  You must first “set-up” your app by defining its content, entering its name, describing it, uploading screen shots, etc.  Then you’re faced with one of most annoying aspects of Apple — you have to have an Apple computer to actually upload something.  Whether that makes Steve Jobs a genius or a jerk is a discussion for another day.   Unlike my posting about how to create a certificate with a Windows-based machine, there’s no way around this one — believe me, I looked.  No worries at Outskirts Press; we have lots of Apples, but for many people, I’m sure it’s a pain and, deep down, you have to wonder if it isn’t playing a role in Android’s impressive market gains.

Once we initiated the uploading process, we receive the following email notification:

Dear Outskirts Press,

The status for the following app has changed to Waiting For Upload.

App Name: Outskirts Press Free Publishing App
App Version Number: X.XXXXX
App SKU: 01
App Apple ID: XXXXXXXX

To make changes to this app, sign in to iTunes Connect and open the Manage Your Applications module.

If you have any questions regarding your app, click Contact Us in iTunes Connect.

Regards,

The iTunes Store Team

We received that at 2:50.

Step one complete. Stay tuned for Step two.

Apple

How long does it take for Apple to approve an app?

Over the past few months this blog has touched upon our on-going process to establish a developer account for Apple apps, get our certifications, get approval, and deal with their Customer Service when issues arose. Whew — all that finally got done and then we were faced with developing the actual application, which I’m happy to say is complete and now in Apple’s queue for approval.

So that brings us to the next part of the process, which is waiting for Apple to approve the application. “How long does it take for Apple to approve an app” you may be wondering.  It depends upon a couple of factors.  First-time apps from first time submitters/developers seem to take longer.  The “complexity” of the application itself also plays a role in the review time line. In general, it can range from a couple of days to a couple of weeks. I’ve even heard horror stories of review processes taking a couple of months (albeit, that involved several rejections and iterations of the app to achieve approval).   Then again, our developer approval process took months when it was theoretically only supposed to take days, so it’s anyone’s guess.

Our Outskirts Press free publishing app is relatively simple. It grabs various RSS feeds from our social communities and displays them within the APP so our authors (and potential authors) can keep up-to-date on the happenings and goings-on with self-publishing, book marketing, and Outskirts Press in general.  As a result, I don’t expect our app to take VERY long to approve.

The approval process is comprised of a number of steps, several of which we have already completed, and I’ll cover those steps next…