Lingopal (blog)

I have blogged before about the frustrations in getting updates approved by Apple. And now I will do it again.

As it stands, we currently have 3 applications available for sale: Lingopal, Flirta and Voyage. The updates for all were submitted at the same time. Weeks passed, emails were exchanged, clients became angry, and eventually the updates for Lingopal and Flirta were approved.

A couple of weeks on, Voyage’s update still hasn’t been approved. Apple’s standard reply to my email enquiries doesn’t help that much:

“… still under review which is requiring unexpected additional time. While there is no additional information to share at this time, we wanted you to know it is still in process. We apologize for the delay, and will update you with further status as soon as we are able.”

Then last week I received an email from someone in Apple’s Worldwide Developer Relationship section, wanting to chat about the delay. My hopes shot up.

We had the chat, and Paul, the fellow from Apple, explained what the problem was. Because I wanted to avoid the situation where potential customers might download Voyage, only to have it crash on them (because the current build doesn’t work on OS 3.0), I put a nice fat warning in the Application Description within iTunes - *** Does not work with OS 3.0. We are waiting on Apple for our update’s approval *** - or something like that. I thought this a reasonable thing to do.

However, it seems that Apple’s system didn’t like it; the reference to OS 3.0 not working flagged some kind of error and meant that our update was deemed faulty.

But hang on - I only put that extra sentence or two in the app description of the current app, not the description for the update. So why should it be a problem? To investigate, I went into the iTunes Connect section where we manage our apps and their submissions, and sure enough, the app description for the current version was copied over verbatim to the update. So our update, designed to work on OS 3.0, had a warning about it not working on OS 3.0. Apparently you can’t have two separate descriptions.

That seems kind of silly to me. Anyway, I deleted the problematic sentences, and now there is no reference to either the current app or the new update not working on OS 3.0. That means two things:

1) there’s no reason why the update should not now get approved (it still hasn’t)

2) I expect to now get angry emails and poor reviews from people who (unwarned) download the current Voyage build and have it crash on them.

You can’t win.

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