This little app went to market

When you submit an app to Apple for approval, it can take a few days or a few weeks, even a few months for apps to get approved. After reading the various developer forums, we estimated that ours should take 1-3 weeks.

The submission process begins before it actually begins. You have to look for Apple’s checklist of tasks to do before submitting and also browse the just-as-helpful checklists created by experienced iPhone app developers. Among the tasks you should accomplish in advance of submission: you want to confirm—or have your developer confirm—that  your code meets “HIG” standards (HIG=Human Interface Guidelines), that you have a logo image saved at the right size for use on the iTunes store, that you have your description written (and proofread!), and that you know what category your app belongs to—lifestyle, entertainment, games, and so forth.

One item that no checklists had prepared us for was the “EULA” (End User Licensing Agreement). Once you get into the submission form, there is an option to just check a box that essentially says your EULA doesn’t violate anything in the Apple EULA. Of course, we didn’t have a EULA. This made us pause our submission process for a while to give this serious attention. The EULA is the contract that a user signs before being allowed to receive a copy of the application. You probably sign EULAs a lot when you sign up for online services or buy products at Amazon and other vendor sites. Most people don’t really read them. They are pretty routine as contracts go, but we were just checking to make sure we did everything right. We did our due diligence and were back on track later that evening. Like everything in our experience of creating an app to sell at Apple, there were more delays and pauses than we wanted there to be and we had to decide each time whether to give up or patiently overcome them. We kept choosing the latter.

Now, a word about the submission site at Apple: the developer sites we followed had implied that submission at Apple would be easy. But then again, in 2009 we had heard that developing an app would be easy. HA!

In the beginning of this project, we actually thought we—myself and Lyle—could use the Apple Software Developers Kit to write a software application ourselves. The first realization that this was not feasible came when we learned that it had to be done on a Macintosh and we only had PCs. Then I watched the “How to get started” videos, my eyes crossed, and we started calling developers. The rest of the story of how we found developers and created the app is already recorded here in the previous blog posts.

So, when we were ready to submit the app ourselves and entered the submission web site, we should have known by the confusing—one might even say “opaque”—user-interface that we would need a developer’s help to do this. Even our developers had warned us. But, we persevered for hours until we couldn’t do any more ourselves—we answered all of the questions, uploaded the image files, and filled in the needed information. Uploading the app itself seemed like something we should be able to do, but the Macintosh requirement thwarted us again. We couldn’t even download the submission tools to assess what we were capable of doing ourselves. Our developers were correct. And, our current developer, Focus, efficiently and happily did the final stage of submission for us.

I review this all to make the point that, despite the statements of experienced developers to the contrary, there is a popular notion that anyone can do this. We are enterprising and teachable but we learned quickly that having a developer was critical every step of the way. We would still spend the long hours that we heard all start-up founders spend, but it would be devoted to the many other critical pieces of the process, not to the technical side of things.

On November 19, after our developer hit the final “submit” button for us, we received an email from Apple that said “Waiting for Review.” I think we cried. Despite a few bumps in the interim, nearly 4 weeks later, on December 16, we received an email from Apple saying that our status had changed to “Ready for Sale.” I still can’t believe it.

Our little app had made it to market. Now what?