Most of my updates have only taken a few days. It was just the initial release that took forever. I don't know what the deal was other than they must have played each of the 24 missions and it took them a while to beat it.
Looks like Apple wants to give some early christmas presents, our applications get approved in lightning speed: our Bomber Online update 1.2 got approved in 3 days
I came here to post that too. My update got approved in 3 days. It was a crashing bug fix, but no functional fixes. I just wanted to get it out there, but expected a week, maybe more.
It just occurred to me that maybe after updates not showing up on new releases anymore, devs are no longer flooding the review queue with useless updates. Maybe they finally got through the backlog and we'll be able to see 3 day approvals. I hope this is the case and not only extra manpower during the holiday season.
"In review" is totally meaningless. Our latest game, Depict, is a multiplayer game and we can see on the server when people are coming and going. Therefore, we knew exactly when Apple's reviewers logged in. The first time they reviewed the game it changed to "In Review" after exactly a a week (at 8am in the morning). However, no one logged into the game for another 3 days and it wasn't rejected until the fourth day. The second time they reviewed it, it took exactly a week again and it changed status at 8am again and this time no one even opened the app. On the fourth day (again) it changed status to approved. It seems like they just change it to "in review" so that you'll think something is going on.
The latest update to Charmed took 7 days exactly to go to the "In Review" state. It stayed "In Review" for 6 more days. It was a simple bug fix that I desperately wanted to have out ASAP. It seems that they are a bit quicker these days though. During that time, there was not a single score from anyone at Apple on the leaderboards, which means they either did not play it or they did not bother to check the OpenFeint functionality at all. I just really wonder what they actually DO to "review" a game. Really...I am REALLY curious! Maybe a TA member can apply to become a tester and report back to us.
It really depends from app to app and current weather conditions. Sometimes the reviewers play 1 minute, sometimes 30 minutes and with multiple people from different parts of the world. I would say what they are mainly doing is checking if the app is starting and works for at least 1 minute of game play. Additionally they check if the descriptions, keywords, icon and screenshots are ok. This is possibly done by different people so a change in the application status possibly means that it is assigned to different people.
