If you’re a developer, this is pretty interesting.
Shiny Development’s recently-launched appreviewtimes.com has begun tracking review times for both the iOS and Mac App Store using data crowdsourced from iOS and Mac developers.
While the site’s data is not official Apple data and is based on anecdotal data gathered from people posting their latest review times on Twitter and App.net using the #macreviewtime or #iosreviewtime hash tags, it is a public effort to obtain more accurate review times.
To contribute data, just post to Twitter or App.net with the time it took for your last app review and include one of the hash tags along with a number of days. Just the hash tag and “X days” is all that is needed at a minimum but including the app name/link is also good.
Users can also include the “Waiting for Review” times and can include the full time from uploading your app and going into review right through to a “Ready for Sale” status.
To date, the system has collected 26,945 data points since being switched on but only those reported recently are actually used to calculate the averages above.
It’s hard to say if this will push Apple to review and approve apps more quickly, but it’s nice to get a more accurate view of how long the approval process is taking at any point in time.