Creating an app - Episode 8 - The final chapter

Peter: 00:08

Alright, everybody. Welcome to part eight of this series, creating an app. We have now completed our app, and we are ready to submit to the stores. Now interestingly, this can be the best and the worst part depending on how your experience goes, and I'm gonna talk about that. So again, this is very specific to mobile apps.

Peter: 00:28

In particular, we're talking about Google and Apple here, of course. And this deserves some specific coverage here because, again, if you're doing this as a web app or some other medium, you're not really gonna have these problems. Maybe with the Apple App Store for Mac, perhaps, but this is arguably one of those areas that can be frustrating or surprisingly delightful. Now what do I mean by that? You have probably heard very mixed experiences from folks who submit and things get reviewed and they get passed first time.

Peter: 01:04

I'm very lucky. I think that is usually what happens to me. And I will say that it's part luck and part just having done so many releases over the years that it's experience as well. And you will have the other folks who, no matter how hard they've tried and how many times they've done it and how experienced they are, they just seem to have the worst luck when it comes to submitting apps for review. So I'm gonna try and give you some general pointers here to try and ease the process for you.

Peter: 01:36

Now, again, you will have listened to the previous episodes. Well done, you. And if you haven't, shame on you. Go back and listen to them because this is how we got to this point. Right?

Peter: 01:45

We went through the app creation process. We created our store page, and now we're ready to submit this app and this store page for review. Now number one, hopefully, you have followed all the good practices and all the good guidelines that I've given you through the other episodes, and you have created an app that is compliant or you believe to be compliant with the app store rules for the relevant app store, including things like interface design and all of those kind of nice things. I mentioned accessibility, of course, in one of the previous episodes. Now that you have all that and you have created your store page with the description and the screenshots and everything else, and you are now attaching these binaries, the upload process, if you're on Apple, you probably did it through Xcode and submitted up through Xcode and did an archive.

Peter: 02:35

And if you don't know what that means, eventually, you will reach a point where you need to export it from Xcode up to Apple. That process is called archiving, and you can go through and send it up test flight. We've spoken about that before. And then there's the option to attach that binary to a submission for app review. So once you've done that, you're gonna save it and you're gonna submit it for review.

Peter: 02:59

Same on the Google side. You're gonna create a new release. You're gonna submit it for review. Now you have that frustrating moment of having to wait, and it's gonna go through a series of steps. If you're doing this on the Google side, what's gonna happen is you will submit it for review.

Peter: 03:17

You have probably already done this via one of the testing track, but in case you haven't, it's the same thing. It's gonna go through. It's gonna get a review. It's gonna be checked for malicious code or some sort of preflight checks and automated processes that Google do. If that is successful, then what happens is it then becomes ready for release, and you can, of course, release it to the store and away you go.

Peter: 03:43

Fantastic. On the Apple side, what happens is it'll be added to a queue for review, and you will get emails telling you the various stages, or you can go into the portal and check them there as well. And, eventually, what'll happen is you will get a notification that it's gone into review. Now if there's some kind of problem and it gets rejected, you're gonna get notified about that, and you're gonna be told what's wrong with it. And it's up to you to work through depending on what it tells you and fix those problems.

Peter: 04:17

And then you can resubmit it and away you go. You go through this process again. You also have the opportunity to converse in some way with Apple on this. So if these you can actually reply to the review that you get, and I'm gonna talk about that in a second here. Now on the flip side, of course, let's say that it gets accepted.

Peter: 04:42

You will be notified that it's accepted. You have two different ways you can do this. Same on the Google side. You can either say, look. When you've accepted this and it's good, automatically send it out to the store.

Peter: 04:54

I never recommend doing that, and I'll explain why. The other option is you say, I wanna manually release this. Right? So they're gonna do the review. They're gonna come back whichever platform it is and say, hey.

Peter: 05:08

You have passed review. You are ready to be distributed in the stores. You can then go into the portals and activate that yourself when you are ready. Okay? That's a huge key difference there.

Peter: 05:20

Now why is that important? Because you want to control the narrative. Right? Now especially if this is a 1.0 release, you're gonna wanna make sure everything is aligned ready for your release. And I'm gonna give you a few examples here.

Peter: 05:36

You're gonna wanna make sure your production environments are up and running. Any media or social posts or contacting whatever, news outlets or newsletters, any of those kind of things. You wanna make sure you have all of that ready to go and align with whatever your plan is. Right? So maybe, for example, you have a specific date in mind that you wanna release this app.

Peter: 06:03

And so that gives you an opportunity to say, okay. It's past app review, even whatever, a month early. And it's sitting there waiting, and you can go get all of the other stuff ready to do this big release, this big announcement, whatever that may be for you. And by doing this manual release, you control that. Otherwise, what could happen is it could go in for app review, and it might be whatever, 03:00 in the morning where you are.

Peter: 06:30

You could be asleep in bed and boom, it's released. And you're not gonna know until you wake up and check your email or check the store or whatever. And who knows what happens during that time? I always recommend manual release so that you are ready there and you know it's happening and you can respond to what happened. Right?

Peter: 06:52

So if it immediately goes out, for example, and there's a problem and people start downloading it and they're like, hey. There's a problem. It doesn't work or you notice something is wrong, you are primed and ready to respond for it as opposed to finding out after it happened. Right? And I cannot recommend that strongly enough.

Peter: 07:14

You control the narrative. Okay? Now let's talk about when you are communicating with Apple and Google because they found an issue. Issue. Okay?

Peter: 07:25

First of all, remember, these folks, right, they control ultimately your fate, whether you get in an App Store or not. Now don't go getting all upset about it and angry about it or frustrated or whatever. Take a deep breath. Before you speak to any of these people replying to them via and we all know that text is a terrible way to communicate, but that's what we got. Take a deep breath and reply.

Peter: 07:55

Be courteous. If there's a problem and you have a specific question, ask that specific question. Okay? These people will only ever give you a finite amount of their attention, usually very small, usually very short. So when you reply, be kind, be nice, be understanding, but be direct to the point.

Peter: 08:21

You have a question, ask that question, and give them all the detail because what you don't wanna end up is, you know, these email chains, right, where you just keep going forever. If you're lucky, they'll reply to you pretty quickly, and maybe they'll tell you exactly what's wrong or give you some clue that you can put the pieces together and fix it and resubmit. But along this process, right, don't take that attitude of, but my app's the best ever and I'm a super cool developer and I work for company x and I demand that you let my app in the store. It's not gonna make any difference to these folk. Right?

Peter: 08:58

They don't care. It's not gonna make any difference who you are. So just don't bother going that route. Alright? Ask specific questions.

Peter: 09:07

No more, no less. Give the information if they're asking for information. If they point out something's wrong on the store page, fix it. Okay? And resubmit it.

Peter: 09:18

And if you're lucky, maybe that resubmission will go through or you may have to repeat this a couple of times. Alright? Good news is once you've got that one dot o out there, hey. Life's gonna go better for you, hopefully. Right?

Peter: 09:31

But be understanding. Take deep breaths. Give it a little time. Sure. Of course, you're gonna be excited.

Peter: 09:37

Immediately, you get that response, and then you're gonna be deflated when it's not a good response. But take some time. Maybe step away from the keyboard for a little while, whatever that may be. Again, this is why I keep telling you, do this way ahead of time for when you need the release to happen, if you need it to happen at a specific date and time. That way, you're calm, composed, and you can deal with this and be very professional about it.

Peter: 10:04

Right? Because, again, it doesn't matter how angry you get with these folks. They're not gonna care. It's the simple fact. Right?

Peter: 10:11

You are one in a millions of apps. Right? Simple as that. And at the end of the day, this is the gateway to get your app in the stores. So you need to be on the game here.

Peter: 10:25

Alright? Because there's no other way you're gonna get it through, and you can't force them to change their mind. Simple as that. Play the game as it were. Play it.

Peter: 10:33

Play along with them. Make them happy. Alright? I know that's gonna frustrate some folks, but you gotta make them happy. It's as simple as that.

Peter: 10:40

Okay? Hopefully, by the end of this, you now have an app ready to release or maybe you've hit the button and you've released it. At this point, of course, you're gonna send out all your media. You're gonna get all the folks reviewing it. Hopefully, you're gonna get folks downloading it.

Peter: 10:55

You have a fantastic experience because you have got to the end of your app release, your 1. O release, or maybe an update, and you've gone through this cycle. Well done. This is actually a lot harder to do than many folks think. There's always those Internet people.

Peter: 11:15

You see them on app reviews. This is crap, and I can do better than this and yada yada. Whatever. They didn't release it. They didn't do it, get through the process, and release it.

Peter: 11:25

You did. You should be extremely proud of what you've done, and go tell the world about it. Right? And be excited about it. Because if you're excited about it, you're gonna make other people excited about it.

Peter: 11:38

And so I really hope this series has helped. If it has, like the other folks who've already reached out to me and said thank you and expressed their thoughts and opinions, and I appreciate you all, and those folks who went to PeterWitham.com/ BMC and bought me coffees, thank you so much for that. I can't tell you how much I appreciate it. If this has been really helpful and this has been useful, right, leave a review, tell other folks, share this with folks. But, also, let me know if there are other series like this you would like me to do and it's a topic that I can talk about and I'm knowledgeable about, I will be only too happy to do it.

Peter: 12:20

I really enjoyed making this series and putting all of these kind of brain notes together in this small series of from years of doing this and putting it out there. And I would love to do this on other topics because I kinda got the buzz for it now. Right? But I wanna only do things that are useful to folks, and I can only know that if you tell me. So go to Peter Wynnum dot com and tell me.

Peter: 12:45

That's it, folks. Good luck with this. I would love, love, love to hear your stories of success on this. And if you've got some problems you're trying to work through or something like that, hey. I'm only too happy to try and help with that as well.

Peter: 13:01

But that's it. Go out, celebrate your app release, and then start planning the next update. Because guess what? It's a cycle, and it goes over and over. But you've got the one dot o out, and that is so important.

Peter: 13:16

Shipping that first thing is the first step on the path that says, I got to the end of the first journey. You will be amazed at how many folks don't get to that point. You have done a hell of a lot to get there, and you deserve recognition for it, And you deserve to go celebrate. That's it, folks. I will speak to you in the next episode.