The Mac OS X App Store brought a dedicated area for iOS apps to be downloaded on the desktop. But why are review times increasing?

Dan Wood, co-founder of Karella Software, developers of Sandvox, posted on his blog on Oct. 10 about approval times. While he praised Mac App Store for providing "another discovery mechanism and distribution mechanism," Wood criticized review times for increasing over multiple months.

"Now let's hope that the App Store team will do something about these worsening review queue times. (It's not the actual review that takes a long time, but waiting to get reviewed.) Our latest update had us waiting a month, and it looks from submitted statistics and reports from others that it's affecting other developers as well," Wood said.

The "statistics and reports from others" may refer to Shiny Development's findings. It tracked review times for Mac App Store submissions from January to October 2012, revealing an increase in review times. The reasons are unclear, and whether the trend will continue to rise after Oct. 2012 is unknown.

Tracking times from April to October 2012, the chart begins at seven days for apps, dropping to under a week during April, and rising to just under approximately a month (28 days) in October 2012. Covering 62 apps over 39 days, the company revealed the rising trend is reflective of wider samples despite the small sample.

"The averages on this site are based only on the data gathered from Twitter which are a very small subset of the total number of apps which go through review each day. However in our experience it does give a reasonable indication of how review times are changing over time," it added.

Apple is famous for having a closed app submission policy, meaning apps have to be vetted by the company, a contrast to Google's and Microsoft's open approaches (the latter is launching Windows Store with Windows 8). The policy means high-profile submissions but the reasons for increasing review times are unclear.