Here We Go!
Yesterday (12/10/09) the eBall journey entered a new phase. After over a year of development, Neonatura LLC has submitted its first iPhone/iPod touch application, ElectroBall, to the iTunes Connect system for application review — a process we're affectionately referring to as “Apple Application Approval”, or AAA for short ... catchy, ain't it?
Of course, that's normally the abbreviation for anti-aircraft artilery — which seems entirely appropriate, as Apple's job here is also to shoot down the “unworthy”.
Submitting our first application (the free demonstration version) was pretty intimidating, but after we got the hang of it, the second one (the full version) went more smoothly. There's a maze of questions to be answered about ratings, features, and so forth — and all sorts of data to be uploaded (application, publicity text, screen shots, etc.) It took a few hours, but we finally got through it, and our applications were listed as “Pending Review” — which means the review process hasn't started yet, and we're waiting in the queue. I guess (since it was after midnight — by a lot) we actually submitted our apps on 12/10/09.
Some blogging I had read suggested that we might expect to stay that way for awhile — I've seen suggestions that if things went really well, you could expect about a week in limbo, and then a week in review. And Apple only added the “Pending Review” status recently, suggesting that there could at least sometimes be long wait times. The two-week timeframe also seemed to fit with Apple's reports that most applications are accepted for sale in about two weeks.
To our surprise, however, our application had moved directly into “In Review” status by 9:30am the next morning! Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I have no idea; I guess we'll just have to wait and see what happens. We've seen all sorts of horror stories about the AAA process on the Internet, from reports of seemingly random rejections to simply “dropping the ball” to purposefully stalling — but I'm sure that a lot of junk gets sent Apple's way, and sour grapes could have something to do with all the gripping. Having to review over 100,000 actually accepted apps — and who knows how many rejected ones (not to mention upgrades) is not a job I'd want to get stuck with. It's probably pretty thankless, too.
How soon we'll get an answer back is anybody's guess. If a few staff members are “unavailable” at this time of year, who could blame 'em? We'll be sure to let you know how it turns out...