What does Approve button do with changeset on bitbucket.org?

Question

When using Bitbucket for source control, there's an "Approve" button that appears at the upper right of the commit page:

It appears to generate an activity message in the repositories overview page:

Is that all it does? What is the intended purpose of that button? Is it just a social feature?

Answer 1

One use case is when a pull request gets a certain number of approvals, then it gets merged, either automatically or manually.

Thus it becomes easy to filter all the pull requests which are ready to be merged.

It's quite a common feature in code review tools. I have found it to be almost identical in GitLab too.

Answer 2

The question was about commits, not pull request. I just created a new pull request from an approved commit and there was no automatic approval on the pull request from the same reviewer who approved the commit. Social feature indeed.