About the application

Hi, Habr. I want to talk about my first experience (in general, here I’m a little falsehood, but more on that later) development for the AppStore and, perhaps more interestingly, about what lessons I learned from this. The application is called iAutographer - and in itself is rather trivial. It will provide an opportunity to collect autographs, tying them to the contacts of the phone and throw on the general panel (Sign Board). Then, when viewing the autograph, it is redrawn, thereby creating the sensation that a person signs before your eyes. On this, perhaps, about the application and all. In order to look at him in action, I quote 10 promotional codes here:

KWXLTXX9ENHW
FRLWJ64X46NH
76WT4PMF36KK
FYWR3XAN4FPX
HLWXH4NMTYNA
J9MWH9HKK9RW
EW9343LX9P4N
AXRNYT3XK76A
TF6WRYNJFNNW
39MP9A3TLHXP
and a dozen more ready to send on request. Unfortunately, they are only valid in the US AppStore.

Why pay?

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Now I’ll tell you why this is the first application and immediately for the money, the fact is that by the second half of 2010 we (about “we”, if interested, I will write a little later), it was decided to devote to studying and testing new platforms, such as iOS, Android, Symbian, WP7 and of smaller, so far, players such as MeeGo, BADA, etc. As before, the team had experience only in the development of web applications, and a rather large amount of time was chosen. Oh yeah, in our geolocation, the probability of finding a developer for mobile platforms frantically tends to zero, and after some short attempts we decided to “educate our fighters”. It was decided to split the time into several stages, the first of which was to create free applications, go through the thorny path of adding to the market (yes, Android makes the task much easier here) and actually achieve at least some installations and user reviews, and then try to write paid applications. But the application, which was put on review on September 5, and now there. I do not want to pour dirt on Apple, since the first reason for the refusal was that the key for the background operation of the application was defined in the Info.plist file, and this functionality later disappeared in the code. However, during the second refusal, I was very surprised, firstly when my phone reported by midnight that they were calling from San Jose CA, well, secondly, that the reason for the refusal is that the application allows you to attach photos to reviews that was unacceptable for Apple, and, citing the legal aspects, I was sent on a second mission. In general, I still consider the refusal not fair, because in almost any service there is an opportunity to leave a comment (which, by the way, is not moderated in any way) and attach photos of Semyonovich, but there is no hurry to tweet something. Based on the fact that frankly technical bugs were not found (crashes, errors, etc.), I hope that from the third approach the application will finally appear in the store. And iAutographer was moderated for the 7 days promised by Uncle Steve. And that is why the first application turned out to be paid.

Underwater rocks

I want to apologize in advance to those who know it all.

Info.plist

So, as I said above, before adding an application for consideration, it is worthwhile to walk through Info.plist in some detail, errors or inaccuracies in it may not affect the operation of the application, and the tests will not reveal it, but the apples look very carefully . Check the availability of all icons and preloaders (now the truth is already strictly described in the rules for adding).

Reports

Reports on sales and installations of your application will not appear immediately after adding it to the AppStore. The very appearance of the store took about 4-6 hours from the moment I received the notification about the change of the application status to “Ready for sale”. And reports became available only after two days. There is a wonderful iTC Mobile utility for viewing them directly on your iPhone, but it will talk about an error, until reports appear, I was frankly surprised by this, because if there are no reports yet, why not report it to the user in more user-friendly form than “Error No data found for your request” right at the start of the application.

Phone conversation

Despite the fact that the documentation is completely in English, if your spoken English leaves much to be desired (I have such a case), you can tell about it during a telephone conversation with Apple, and literally within a few minutes you should find the other end of the wire our compatriot. In any case, I had two times just that way.

App loader

Starting with the third version of the SDK, there is now no need to download applications via the web interface, now in XCode you can simply order Build → Build And Archive. Which is really very convenient, since developer.apple.com seemed very uncomfortable to me.

Legislation

Apple wrote for nothing that the App Store Review Guidelines is a “live document”, and many things that are not described there can be applied to your applications, as for example it was in our case. Therefore, before adding, pay attention to the differences in the laws of our countries.

Conclusion

As it was already repeatedly noted, the development for the AppStore really includes a lot of unnecessary formalities and, in my opinion, is less pleasant for a beginner than, say, the same Android. Of course, Java for most developers is more convenient than Objective c. Of course, when it’s not a month but less than a day that passes from the idea of ​​a simple application to its appearance in the market. But the AppStore also has its advantages, the main one being the purchasing power of users and the fact that the new application receives more attention here than we say in the Android Market.

UPD Decided that this topic has a bigger place in “I am promoting”.