I just got my first iPhone app into the store! iTunes link This can be a traumatic experience for many developers, and we all learn more about what the process is like through blogs, so here’s my own war story.
I submitted my app on June 14, 2009. It went live on the store on June 24. Let’s call that ten days. Better than some, worse than others. Plenty acceptable for me.
You’ve no doubt read about the horrors of trying to get your app properly signed for deployment on hardware devices and for distribution through Apple’s store. It certainly happened to me as well. I’m not going to go into all the details, because I followed so many dead ends that I’m not sure what I did anymore. I’ll mention the main thing that bit me hard, though. My app’s name has a space in it. When Xcode expanded the ${PRODUCT_NAME} variable into my app’s identifier, it replaced that space with an underscore. This worked fine for ad hoc builds, but the app store flatly refused to accept it. The error message I got didn’t tell me what the real problem was. After much googling and reading other people’s anguished cries, I solved it by removing the underscore. It looks like current versions of Xcode expand spaces to dashes, which is hopefully acceptable for distribution.
I was most worried about HIG violations. I did a lot of things in my app that are not very, um, “Apple-like.” My game has extensive settings, but rather than creating a settings bundle, I put them into a tab on my tab bar. I spent quite a bit of time writing a view controller that uses a UIWebView to display help pages, complete with back and forward buttons for navigation. None of Apple’s apps seem to have any help text anywhere. Apple wants you to use your Default.png to make it look like your app loaded faster than it did, but to me that sounds like lying, so my version simply has the word “Loading…” on it. I created an “about” page. Perhaps worst of all, I created a view that displays the app’s memory usage statistics, which will probably confuse the hell out of most people. I very nearly took that out of the final app. But Apple didn’t give me any trouble about any of that stuff. My app sailed through the approval process with nary a peep.
Based on other people’s stories, here’s some problem areas I might have avoided. I made sure that my artist used more or less the same content for the app’s 57×57 and 512×512 icons. I read somewhere that Apple doesn’t like to see version numbers below 1.0.0, so that’s what I used for my app, although most of my projects seem to languish in the 0-dot-something range. I didn’t use any of Apple’s tab bar graphics, because they all have predefined meanings that don’t match what my tabs are for. I didn’t use any undocumented API calls, although I was sorely tempted a few times. I guess that was enough to keep me out of trouble, in this particular case.
