After the office has received your documents, what determines whether your application is approved instantly or is instead sent to ‘application processing’? This seems to be the determining factor in how long your application takes, with applications that need to be ‘processed’ taking considerably longer.
There are two routes through the application process – the digital route and the processing route. According to documents online the digital route means all necessary checks etc can be accomplished digitally – as soon as something crops up, the application is dropped out of the digital route and people get involved – this is the processing update, apparently even requesting a call back is enough to drop the application from the digital route.
I was lucky it took 20 days for my application to be approved, and I went straight from docs received to approved – so this was a digital route application. I had an interview and an hour after that it was approved.
However, that was last Sunday – and I’ve been stuck at approved since then – apparently there are delay in the printing and collection by TNT process now due to demand.