Thirstysea

Now that Fossil and Fossil Icebreaker are released and are available in the app store, we would like to share our experience with the app review process. This is purely based on the personal experience of going through the review process for two applications Fossil and Fossil Lite.

• Submission to Release timeline: ~ 2 weeks

It takes approximately 2 weeks from the time you submit your application till the time it is up on iTunes for sale. But two iternations for a review are common. Even though you might feel you have thoroughly tested your application make allowance for atleast 2 iterations of the review and release (which will mean appr 1 month after you submit)

• No difference in re-review timelines for developer rejected or apple rejected apps

In case of Fossil Lite, the time taken by Apple to review when we resubmitted the application after wwe realized there was a bug was similar to the time taken after we resubmitted after Apple had rejected the binary. Both took approximately 2 weeks.

• App tested on simulator for 3.0 does not suffice at times

Since I had done most of my app development on Iphone OS2.0, I was reluctant to upgrade to 3.0 when the release happened midway. So I released Fossil after testing it on my 2.0 device and 3.0 simulator. Fossil got rejected because it was apparently crashing on the 3.0 device. When I retested it was very much the case. It continued to pass on simulator but crashed on a 3.0 device.

• App Rejection because Tab bar icon similar to a std Iphone app icon

One of the causes of rejection of the free version of my application (Fossil Lite) was that the icon I had used for durations was very similar to the std iphone app icon for stopwatch. This was the cause of the 2nd round of rejection. It would have saved me atleast 2 weeks, had both these errors been reported in the 1st round of review and rejection itself. Also, the other strange thing to note is that the same error wasn?t reported as a cause of rejection on the paid version of th eapplicaiton. The code base for both these applications are the same and ideally should have been reported for both the applications!

So in a nutshell, Apple app reviewers managed to catch one genuine bug in Fossil during the review process and it took them one month to do it.

It took me 15 minutes to fix the bug and 1 hour to come up with a new tab bar icon.

We are excited to announce that we have submitted  a new version of Fossil for approval.

Fossil 1.1 is not very heavy on features but we still have managed to add few things which will delight a few of you there. Without much ado, here it goes:

Features:

• SDK 3.0 compliance: Fossil 1.1 is fully compliant with iPhone SDK 3.0 and it uses some of the new capabilities in SDK to make the views more faster and animation much smoother. You will notice an appreciable difference in the animation in the editing mode in Fossil.
• New Tab Bar Icons: We have completely overhauled all the existing tab bar icons and replaced them with new “pixel perfect” icons.
• Backend optimizations: We tinkered and tinkered and then we tinkered some more with the backend to make data scrolling faster then ever!
• Inline Mail Composer: Sending Reports over email does not exit Fossil anymore, thanks to the support for new in-app mail composer in this release.
• Carbon Theme updated: Do you know there are more than 1 themes supported in Fossil? You can set the themes from Settings app. We tweaked “Carbon theme” a little bit under the hood to make it even more awesome.

Bug Fixes : We also managed to squish a few reported bugs in this release.

1. Badge count aligned correctly
2. Changed Button Title for Overlay Menu. Previously it showed “Cancel” instead of “OK”.
3. Minor updates in inbuilt help

Hopefully, it should take standard 2 weeks for the updates to hit App store.

We would also like to thank glpyhish and pixelpress for their awesome free tab bar icons that they have made available for anyone. Thank you guys!

We are excited to announce that Fossil Icebreaker is available in the app store.

Fossil Icebreaker is the free version of Fossil. It is a fully functional version and it supports up to 100 entries. So grab your free copy and give it a try.

And don’t forget to let us know what we can do better.