Apple has been getting a lot of bad press lately regarding their App approval process. While some of it does seem justified, we wanted to put our $0.02 in.
Bencao is currently our only app in the App store. Generally we've had 7 to 9 days to wait for approvals, which seems acceptable to us.
Recently, we've had a nasty bug affecting some users upgrading to version 1.1, causing them not to be able to open the App at all. We've issued a fix (v1.1.1) but apparently we missed some cases. As soon as we realized there are still users who can't run the app, we've fixed the issue in 10 minutes of work and immediately submitted v1.1.2 to Apple. Since several users have been waiting for this fix for awhile, and meanwhile can't use the app they paid good money for, we deemed this as an urgent fix.
We contacted the App approval team on August 5th well after working hours, explaining the unique situation and the simple fix, asking them to speed up this specific update. One and a half days later, we received the email that Bencao has been jumped ahead in the queue, and 13 minutes later we got the approval message. Now the few users who suffered from this annoying issue can go back to using Bencao again.
We realize that with over 70,000 Apps in the App Store the review team members have their hands full. While we're not sure ourselves how necessary the entire process is, we do appreciate that Apple is listening to developers and apps users and improving the review process. Clear communication channels is an extremely good step in the right direction.
