Amidst all the usual holiday riffraff and scurrying, the App Store review staff at Apple really came through for me today.

We updated five apps (which all share the same codebase) last week, and the update went live Friday night. Unfortunately, there was a huge bug which rendered it useless, due to a missing compiler flag in our deployment configuration. All five of the apps would crash immediately after launching. Zoinks! With the App Store shutting down over the holidays, and app review times taking anywhere from 3-10 days, I feared that we would leave all our users out in the cold for the rest of the year (or longer).

After submitting fixed versions to Apple this morning, I passed along a note via their feedback form, requesting an expedited review. They came through almost immediately, and by early evening our apps were in the store again. Not only that, but they scrubbed all the one-star reviews we received during the short window of time the botched version was available.

Tip o' the hat, gents!