{ by david linsin }

May 03, 2010

iPad Apps have priority

Last year, I worked on a Nine Men's Morris (Mühle) implementation for Android, called Doublemill. Since I'm an iPhone user, I decided to port the game to iPhone/iPod touch and the iPad. There are 3 versions: Doublemill Premium, Doublemill Lite and Doublemill for iPad.

I had to wait for a week, after submitting Doublemill Premium for review to the App Store, until Apple decided to have a look at it. Unfortunately, we were rejected - for a good reason! As it turned out, I didn't link my libraries correctly, which turned out to cause a crash every time you wanted to play online, but I digress...

It took me roughly 2-3 hours to find the bug, fix it and resubmit the App. Now I'm waiting for five days again.

Yesterday, I finished polishing Doublemill for iPad, after reworking the UI and implementing a nicer Player vs. Player experience. Since it was a rainy day and there was only Star Trek on TV, I decided to submit it for review, since it would take at least a week until they had a look at it. I want to be ready for the European start of the iPad and if there's anything wrong with Doublemill for iPad, it would take at least 2 weeks to get it into the App Store - that's what I thought!

After the usual email, you get after submitting, I instantly received another, saying my App is in review. Just like that - without waiting for a week. That got me really upset! I invested almost 4 weeks of my spare time, to gett Doublemill Premium ready and polished and I had to wait for a week until it was in review.

To me this is a clear signal, that iPad Apps are more important to Apple than iPhone Apps - at the moment. I hope this will balance again soon. It is understandable, that they want the iPad App market filled as soon as possible, but that's no reason to make the iPhone App developers wait more than a week. That takes us back to where we were a year ago: waiting and waiting and waiting - just to be rejected!

3 comments:

Ray Wenderlich said...

I've also noticed a long delay waiting for my latest app + another app update to get into review (a week now)! This explains why :]

Mostly Torn said...

This has been the case since pre-iPad launch. Any iPad app submitted will go into the review queue within minutes of being submitted while an iPhone app will takes days before moving from "Waiting for Review" to "In Review."

Back around iPad launch, the situation wasn't too bad though since iPhone apps were still being reviewed within a couple days even if iPad apps were given priority.

Now it seems the queues are getting longer. Over the past few weeks I've seen the wait times for iPhone reviews go from an average of 4 days to more than a week now.

Best guess is there are a bottleneck of new iPad apps.

David Linsin said...

Hi guys,

Doublemill has finally been approved, after more than one week!

The iPad version went straight to "in review" almost 4 days ago and nothing happened!

A week for an App to be reviewed is way too long and they should either get more resources or change the process!


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