I’m not sure if I’m just being impatient, if Apple has been dragging their feet, or if Apple is just under staffed and can’t approve applications fast enough. Either way, the Apple App Approval process sucks. It’s slow, inefficient, subjective, and big brother-ish. Based on conversations with dozens of developers, the average review time for an app to get accepted or rejected is about five days. To me this is too long and should be 1-3 days. I understand that Apple needs to control the overall apps that are pushed out to the iPhone and iPod Touch users, but having to wait for an app to be approved over a week really sucks. I feel like I’ve called Apple support and the representative placed me on hold and then went on a smoke break (I know I used to work in a support environment), or that I emailed customer service about an billing issue and they reply with a canned answer asking me more questions about how great of a job they performed. Just approve the apps already!

I have two apps in the App Store, Hi Jinx Pro and Hi Jinx Lite. Both of these apps are soundboards which simply play a prerecorded sound clip. The Pro version is $0.99 and the lite version is, of course, free. I first submitted the Pro version and it was approved within 4 days. There was an update (v1.1) submitted and this took 5 days for an approval. I submitted the lite version and it took over three weeks to get it approved. Read the rest of this entry »