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.

I’m sitting on a rock,
minding my own business…
… when suddenly, they’re onto me.

Hello,

At this time, XXXX cannot be posted to the App Store because it is crashing on iPhone 3G running iPhone OS 3.0.1. Crash logs have been attached for your reference.
For more information regarding crash logs:

http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/technotes/tn2008/tn2151.html

One look at the document and I have this empty feeling in my stomach.

… resolving stack trace addresses to source code methods and lines – requires the application binary that was uploaded to the App Store and the .dSYM file that was generated when that binary was built. This must be an exact match – otherwise, the report cannot be symbolicated. It’s essential that you keep each build distributed …

Nobody told me before about dSYM files or atleast I did not hear/read about it. And if its a common knowledge in this part of the world, well, before this, I was working under a rock, tinkering with protocols ..

While the good folks on internet here and here have already taken care of explaining in detail the debugging steps, I still required the dSym file.

It turned out, I had the build files after all for one of my app. I was also able to reproduce the problem by just following the instructions given in the mail.

But IMHO, the rejection mail is too late in the process to let me know that I may need the dSYM file. It can probably be mentioned in iTunes Connect Developer guide so that no one misses archiving the build in the last minute rush to release the app.

In case you did not save dSYM files, here are the options for you:

• Try reproducing the problem using the steps sent in the rejection mail.
• Run instruments or static analyzer tool to flush out any errors.
• If nothing else works, submit again, wait for 2 more weeks for Apple approval (or rejection) (of-course am kidding).