How long does App Store review actually take?

Apple publishes one figure: “On average, 90% of submissions are reviewed in less than 24 hours.” That is Apple’s own wording on its App Review page, and it is an average across all submissions rather than a promise about any one of them. Apple does not publish a median, a breakdown by day or month, or a figure for the slower tail, so the honest answer stops there. Apple’s earlier App Review FAQ, answered by an App Store Connect engineer in April 2020, used different wording: “On average, 50% of apps are reviewed within 24 hours and 90% are reviewed within 48 hours.” Plan a dated release with room for a rejection and a resubmission.

Apple does not publish review times by day, so there is no authoritative answer. Apple’s only published figure is that “On average, 90% of submissions are reviewed in less than 24 hours.” The day-of-week chart on this page is an illustrative model built by Patch — it shows the pattern developers commonly describe, mid-week submissions clearing faster than Friday and Saturday ones, and it is not Apple data. If a launch date matters, follow Apple’s own advice instead of timing the queue: “plan and schedule the release of your app in App Store Connect”, and leave room for a rejection and a resubmission.

Apple does not publish a review schedule, so Apple does not say. Submissions are accepted every day, and developers report decisions arriving at weekends. What Apple does document is what to do when timing is critical: “You can request the review of your app to be expedited if you face extenuating circumstances, such as fixing a critical bug in your app or releasing your app to coincide with an event you’re directly associated with.” For an event-linked release Apple recommends you “plan and schedule the release of your app in App Store Connect” rather than depend on review timing.

Apple does not publish a breakdown, so the causes of the slower tail are not documented. Apple states only that “On average, 90% of submissions are reviewed in less than 24 hours”, which leaves roughly one submission in ten outside that window with no published explanation. Apple’s guidance is about what to do rather than why it happened: request an expedited review for a critical bug, and “include the steps to reproduce the bug on the current version of your app”. Anything the page says beyond that — seasonal load, day of week — is a model, not a measurement.

For native Swift apps, Patch ships over-the-air code updates that do not go through App Store review. You keep writing ordinary Swift; the Patch CLI compiles the changed code to WebAssembly and delivers it as a patch that the PatchSDK runs on-device in WasmKit. Covered fixes and logic changes go live in seconds, with staged rollouts and instant fleet-wide rollback. It relies on the interpreted-code provision in Apple’s Developer Program License Agreement §3.3.1(B), formerly §3.3.2 — the same basis CodePush, Expo EAS Update and Shorebird rely on — and your signed App Store binary never changes. It requires iOS 15 or later.

No. Apple publishes one figure: “On average, 90% of submissions are reviewed in less than 24 hours.” The day-of-week chart, the monthly chart and the distribution bars on this page are an illustrative model built by Patch, scaled so that they agree with Apple’s figure rather than contradict it. They are not a measurement of Apple’s queue and they are not Apple data. Apple’s earlier App Review FAQ, answered by an App Store Connect engineer in April 2020, stated: “On average, 50% of apps are reviewed within 24 hours and 90% are reviewed within 48 hours.”