Mac App Store Review Times
A developer training firm named Shiny Development has been tracking waiting times for the App Store review process as closely as it can, and it has bad news for would-be app developers: The waiting times for the Mac App Store are growing longer. In the last six months or so, the waiting time for getting a Mac App published has gone from under seven days to almost as high as a month, according to Shiny’s data. Apple’s process is largely closed off—there is a little bit of information for developers on the main dev Web site, but otherwise Shiny has mostly gathered this information from the various developers it tracks and corresponds with online.
It’s no wonder that Apple doesn’t report the average review time for Mac apps the way it does for iOS ones. And it’s scary as a developer to think that you could ship a bug (or have Apple ship an OS update that introduces one). You work as quickly as possible to get a fix ready, and then Apple sits on it for a month—or longer if you’re unlucky enough to have one of the above-average review times. Even after waiting, there’s no guarantee that your update will be approved. Recently, Apple has rejected apps for not conforming to new, unwritten requirements, e.g. relating to 1024×1024 icons that no user will really see.
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It's worth noting that Apple doesn't report the average review time for iOS, either. If you're alluding to the side-bar here: https://developer.apple.com/news/, that has evidently not been updated in over three months.
@Daniel Thanks for the correction. For iOS, Apple reports the percent of submissions reviewed in the last 8 business days.
I think that Application Loader stops you if you're missing a 1024x1024 icon, so at least you don't have to wait a month to find out about that particular problem.
@Jim It does now, and maybe I’m confusing this with another requirement, but I think there was something like this in July or August where people only found out through actual rejections.
The 1024x1023 requirement has been known for a relatively long time.
What I don't get is why people still bother with the Mac App Store.
