This is very poor UI. No Numbers... oh, add a plus and it works. Also, why do they want the phone number? Is that not a bit invasive just for testing MY app?

I too experience this same issue with a tiny app. Is this something that apple does automatically to "newbies"? The doc says 90+% of all apps get notarised in few minutes. Yet in this, and many other threads, I read about hours, days, weeks. And all are reports from first-time submitters. This should be documented, if that is common standard practice.