With Signal, the biggest issue we have is that review times are extremely inconsistent. Sometimes it's 4 hours, sometimes it's 5 days, and there's no visibility as to why. Our working theory is that there's automated and manual queues, and occasionally, for whatever reason, we fall into the manual queue. But when you work on an app that has weekly updates, randomly getting hit with a review time of several days really throws off your groove. And it can obviously be terrible for moments where you're fixing a critical issue.

As someone who also has to deal with the review process on the Playstore, I feel your pain. Reviews timelines have been all over the place for the past year.

I greatly appreciate that I can now get Signal via Obtainium directly from your VCS. It feels like I am sometimes even getting multiple weekly updates.

I can imagine Apple probably has an automated review of a diff, and probably makes a manual review anytime a system API call changes

Thank you for Signal <3

I agree with this. I had a production Play Store submission approved within 4 hours last week. It feels so random.

Has it ever happened where your submission goes to review and then just sits in the "In Review" state for many days? I am talking 4-5 days? or sometimes longer than a week? And then it gets approved?

That's been happening randomly to me.