#FF00AA

I’ve checked the logs to see when the reviewers actually use the apps for the first time.

In all cases, the reviewers don’t touch the app until the day before approval or rejection. And they don’t seem to interact with the app for more than a few minutes.

That’s an interesting fact. (To add my experience: the reviewer rejected my second app, because it doesn’t display an error message when there is no network connection, before ever actually logging into the service. Which makes or doesn’t make sense. I don’t care. Zen is me. Fuck you, Apple.)

I have a different theory: The delay is intentional. I think Apple has found some good reasons for making app developers wait at least a few days before they spend a second of their time reviewing it.

And that’s borderline-psychotic paranoia.

Here’s my “theory”: the reason the approval delay is consistent across many submissions is simply that Apple has determined that a dozen days was the maximum acceptable delay, so when the queue is getting clogged and delays are about to get longer they reallocate human resources from somewhere else (or hire temps, or simply get less picky and approve apps faster) to get it back to a manageable level.

If Apple hired enough people to approve your app in the ten minutes after you posted them, then those people would spend a good part of some days doing nothing (and there would still be a need to find additional resources on those days when the workload is higher). And that wouldn’t make any business sense, would it.

But then, anyone having to interact with iTunes Connect can’t be faulted for becoming a conspiracy theorist. It would do that to people.