The weekend is over and we are heading towards the end of the third week since we resubmitted iSENDu. We can only speculate why the review of iSENDu takes so long, and Apple’s answers are not very illuminating.

An obvious possibility may be that Apple is overwhelmed by the sheer number of Apps that are submitted to the store. After being forced to shed light on the process, Apple stated that 40 employees are responsible for reviewing the Apps – not a very high number, considering there are already 65 000 Apps in the iTunes App Store. So, on average, each employee has to review between four and five Apps a day (given 365 working days). This simple calculation assumes a uniform distribution of submissions each day, which is certainly not the case since there will be definitely peaks in the submission and the guys at Apple have to review more than five Apps a day. So this could be a decent explanation for the delay.

Another possibility, and we admit that this is a bit far fetched, is that Apple somehow deliberately delays iSENDu (and other bluetooth apps), because of their problems with the bluetooth implementation. Why? After making this functionality available we speculated that there would have been be more bluetooth apps in the iTunes App store. However, there are not that many apps which require bluetooth in the iTunes App Store. Like other bluetooth enabled Apps, iSENDu clearly shows the bugs of Apple’s bluetooth implementation. For instance when “ghost peers” appear because of problems with the internal cache of the bluetooth implementation. Even worse, sometimes the bluetooth implementation of Apple will report the device running iSENDu as peer… Of course, one can never write perfect code. That’s impossible and there will always be the one or other bug. But in the official docs, Apple does not mention these bluetooth bugs. This behavior is not very developer friendly, as you can imagine. In our opinion, Apple would do good in being more open to developers, resulting in better Apps and a better user experience. After all, we use Apple products because if their user experience, don’t we?

Your ikangai team

Tags: Approval Process, Bluetooth, iSENDu, Waiting