"Waiting for Review": what it means and how long it lasts

Waiting for Review means your submission is in Apple's queue and no reviewer has opened it. That is the entire meaning. Nothing is being examined, nothing is being decided, and no signal has been sent to you or about you.

It is a queue position, not a verdict in progress.

How long

Apple publishes an average review time on its App Review page, and that figure moves. Read it there rather than trusting a number in an article, including this one.

What can be said honestly:

The published average is an average. Your submission is one sample.
Queue time is not correlated with anything you can see. A trivial bug-fix update and a first submission of a complex app both sit in the same queue.
Time of year matters. Submissions around Apple's holiday shutdown, and the weeks after a major iOS release, tend to be slower. This is developer experience, widely reported, not something Apple documents.

If you need a date for a launch, do not build the plan on the queue. Build it on PENDING_DEVELOPER_RELEASE: submit early, get approved, and hold the release until you are ready. That converts an unknowable wait into a button you press.

What does not speed it up

Resubmitting. Withdrawing the submission and sending it again puts you at the back of the queue. It does not refresh your position, it resets it.

Contacting App Review to ask. The contact form exists for genuine blockers, not queue-position questions. A "checking in" message does not move you.

A new build. Uploading another binary while a version sits in the queue does nothing to that queue position on its own, and if you attach the new build, you are effectively resubmitting.

Changing the metadata. You cannot. The version is locked in this state.

What actually can change the wait

Expedited review. Apple has a request form for genuinely urgent cases, a critical bug affecting users, or a time-sensitive event. Requests are judged, not granted automatically, and using it for ordinary launch pressure burns credibility for the time you actually need it.

Withdrawing on purpose. If you spot something wrong while queued, withdrawing is the right move even though it costs your place. A rejection costs more.

That is the honest list. There is no third thing.

What you can and cannot do while queued

Locked:

Description, keywords, promotional text, what's new
Screenshots and app previews
The attached build
The version number

Not locked:

Promotional text. This is the exception people forget: it can be updated without a new version.
Anything on a different version in PREPARE_FOR_SUBMISSION
Your app's price and availability
Your server, your API, your content, nothing about App Review freezes your backend

Stuck for longer than feels right

Before assuming something is wrong, check these in order.

Is it actually WAITING_FOR_REVIEW? Look at the version state, not your memory of submitting. A submission that failed to send sits in PREPARE_FOR_SUBMISSION looking perfectly normal.
Did the submission include the build? A version can be submitted with metadata and no binary attached in some flows, and that goes nowhere useful.
Are your agreements signed? Unsigned Paid Applications agreements, or incomplete tax and banking details, can block a submission from progressing. Check Business (Agreements, Tax, and Banking) in App Store Connect.
Is there an unanswered question? Apple sometimes sends a message asking for clarification. Until you reply, nothing moves, and the notification is easy to miss.
Only then, contact App Review. With the app name, version, submission date and a specific question.

What the state changes look like

You will not be told when you leave the queue. WAITING_FOR_REVIEW becomes IN_REVIEW silently. From there you get an email about the outcome, approved, rejected, or a question.

That silence is why people refresh the console. The state is readable from the API at any time, so anything polling on your behalf can tell you the moment it changes rather than the moment Apple decides to email.

AppSubmit polls the version state and notifies you on every transition, including the silent one into review. If you would rather not run a poller, the console shows the same thing. You just have to go and look.