In defense of the app store process

I'll admit it -- I've been (privately) pretty down on the app store process.  After my first app was released (MovieFlick) I swore never again as the pain of trying to push out updates was too much.

I eventually did a second app (DreamApp).  The 1.3 version has been about two months getting out and I was ready to explode today when I got what I thought was another rejection but it all worked out fine.

My first release of 1.3 had a real problem with new user accounts that I never tested and the Apple team found it so although it's frustrating to wait 3 weeks to find out they did a good job of finding a real problem.

My second submit was rejected for using 'undocumented API's'  -- you may have heard that Apple has a new static analysis tool for finding usage of non supported API's and my app was caught in that.  It turns out that one of the libraries I use did have calls to unsupported API's but only for testing purposes (of the framework) - I never actually used them in my code.

grumble, grumble ok submit again… Tonight I got *another* letter about unsupported API's and I was about to explode but then something odd happened…. I got an email saying 'Your app is now for sale'.

It turns out the third letter pointed out the use of a non supported api (NSHost hostWithName) but instead of rejecting it they said "We'll let it go but please fix it for the next release" -- When I first read it I hadn't noticed that fine print but true to their word it's now available.

So in this era of dog piling on top of Apple and the app store process I have to get them some credit for being pragmatic about this… They made a decision to release it but asked nicely for me to fix it next time.

Nice!