By now, your application should be pretty close to code freeze. That’s because you’re not a month before launch, you’re two weeks before launch. That other two weeks is the time you should budget for the final version of the app to get reviewed by Apple, potentially rejected once for something weird, and put through the sausage grinder a second time.

Obviously, if you’re not wedded to a specific shipping date, you can be a little more relaxed about things. But if you need to have the app ready to go on a specific date to, say, dovetail with press releases and a marketing campaign, it would be really good to have the app ready.

Apple will, under extraordinary circumstances, expedite reviews. We had to go to that well once, when the test server we had provisioned for Apple to test against went down right before they tried to test it, leading to a bounced review. But it’s not a well you want to draw from every time you do a release, so careful planning is highly recommended.