Tips for a successful AppStore submission? [closed]

Answer 1

Got "Invalid binary" on several tries. What finally worked was zipping the bundle directly on the Mac and uploading on a Mac. Of course, leave out the .dSYM file. On previous tries, zipping was done on a PC. Rezipping to leave out the .dSYM was also done on a PC on the failed attempts.

Answer 2

If you use a browser other than Safari to interact with the Developer Portal, things may not work. It cost me at least an hour of misery to find this out.

Answer 3

I find they don't really check for memory leaks and stability issues, more usability issues. For instance, my app uses Core Location to find bus stops in Perth. When they tested it in California, they found none nearby (what a surprise!). They pinged me over not displaying an out of area message.

Another thing they pinged on was over the bus stop numbers. In Perth, they are 5 digit numbers. The Apple testers were entering 2 digit numbers, and inadvertently bringing up train stations, for which I use a slightly different code path, and the described functionality in my description wouldn't have worked.

It was actually very handy feedback, and it was good to have someone I didn't know give it the once over. I was quite surprised at how thorough they were at testing. I thought it would just be some sort of automated static verification tool to make sure you weren't trying to breach the iPhone security.

Answer 4

Watch out for the keywords, don't use other app names as keywords. (my music app was rejected after 3 weeks becase i used 'last.fm' as a keyword.)

Answer 5

If you get rejected your submission date will stay the same as when you first submitted resulting in a lower ranking when you app eventually becomes available. If you do get rejected ask apple to remove the first submission and instead of replacing the binary on the rejected app, submit it as a new application with a newer version number 1.1 etc.

Some people suggest keeping your app free for a week or so during a promotional phase, then raising the price later. I have tried both ways and so far it appears to be 6 one way and 1/2 a dozen the other. For every 1000 free downloads you are getting expect about 10 at $0.99 (again this is my experience)

One minor thing I ran into. Make sure you Small Embedded icon 57x57 matches the Large 512x512 icon. If it is "too" different in their opinion they will reject the app. So avoid trying to showing even a little more detail in the larger icon.

Answer 6

Submitting information from the device to Internet is also a potential pitfall. The SDK Agreement says:

Any form of user or device data collection, or image, picture or voice capture or recording performed by the Application (collectively “Recordings”), and any form of user data, content or information uploading, syncing, or transmission performed by the Application (collectively “Transmissions”) must comply with all applicable privacy laws and regulations as well as any Apple program requirements related to such aspects, including but not limited to any notice or consent requirements. In particular, a reasonably conspicuous visual indicator must be displayed to the user as part of the Application to indicate that a Recording is taking place.

If you do something like submit the highscores from a game, make sure you give the user a chance to skip the transmission. Otherwise you may get rejected, happened to us.

By the way: There is no guarantee that if your first version gets through, all the updates will. Our 1.1 got rejected for a feature that was already in 1.0. This is very annoying, since the update might be fixing a bug and if it takes a week to get rejected, you’re already a week late when you have to start fixing something you thought was not broken.