By Benjamin Chute

After almost exactly one year of conversations, scoping, architecting, programming, testing, more scoping, more architecting, more programming and more testing, TruQC was submitted to the Apple App Store on May 25, 2012.

I receive a lot of questions about how long the Apple approval process takes and, unfortunately, no one can answer that question except Apple. However, people who have gone through the process can share their stories. As of June 5, 2012, Apple states that 99% of iOS submissions are reviewed within five business days. That goes both for new app submissions and app updates. You can visit the Developer news site and look in the upper right to get an up-to-date forecast.

Not bad!

Five days to review the app? Sounds reasonable! I assumed that this meant that Apple would start their review within five days, but it says nothing about turnaround time. I’d heard of long waits in the past though not so much recently. I also assumed that if the app was rejected for any reason that the five-day review clock would start over. If that reject process were to continue and repeat, there could theoretically be no end.

TruQC was submitted late on Friday, May 25. The Monday following was a holiday, so I started our review clock on Tuesday, May 29 as Day 1. At the end of Friday, June 1 (Day 4) we hadn’t heard anything. Since it does say “business days”, I assumed we’d hear something the next Monday. However, I was pleasantly surprised to get an alert from iTunes Connect Mobile on my iPhone on Saturday, June 2 that our app was under review and then that it was ready for sale. So though the official “Released” date in the iTunes Store lists June 4, it was actually ready for download June 2, just four business days after it had been submitted.

Beautiful.