iPhone Developer Program

From IPhone Dev FAQ

Differs between people, businesses, and time of year.

One business said: accounts can take a month or more to set up for individuals, much longer for businesses. Then you have to register your banking information (after you have an account), and that can take another month or longer to process. From my first Apple interaction until the first day I could submit an app to the app store (and then wait for that to get approved) took me over 3 months.

Another said: took us about 2 weeks

So expect it may take a month or more in the average case, maybe much quicker if you're lucky or time it right.

Follow-up question: for business, you mean when company opens a 'Standard Company' or 'Enterprise' program, right? here is a image with all possible developer programs

http://img259.imageshack.us/img259/2457/screenshotaur.png

Answer: yeah individual accounts vs. business accounts (two types) Business accounts, anecdotally, take longer. Both require that you set up a bank account AFTER the developer account if you want to get paid.

Q: and there are two possible business acoounts: 'Standard Company' or 'Enterprise', for AppStore or for AdHoc

A: correct. AdHoc/AppStore require any kind of account.

Random collection of experiences:

assuming apple doesn't rescind their "approval" in the future [knock on wood], it took less than 24h for me.

I got approval in 24 hours in June 2009

I think it took us like a week and a half but we're in India

And I thought it would happen fast, then I had to sit on a working app for a month while I waited for banking to go through.  ;P