On Tuesday of this week I discovered that the Dapple 1.3 update had been rejected by Apple. There are a few interesting items to this story, so I thought I’d share it.
I had submitted an update to both Dapple and Dapple Lite on Wed, July 8th. On Thu, July 16th I received an email from Apple saying that the Dapple Lite version had been approved. I pulled Dapple Lite off the store, because I didn’t want the versions to be out of sync. I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to put it back on the store, but that’s a post for another time!
At any rate, Dapple hadn’t been approved yet, so I waited. And waited. And waited…
I was logging into iTunes Connect daily to make sure that it hadn’t been approved and I just hadn’t been sent an email. But no, there was the icon for the new release, right below the icon for the current version. And that’s where I made my first mistake. More on that in a minute.
On Tue, July 21st, I tweeted that it had been 13 days for Dapple so far with no approval or rejection. It turns out that this was false. Later that morning I logged into iTunes Connect to look at something related to a discussion I was having with another developer. It was at that point that I actually noticed that the update’s status was “Rejected”. When I was logging in to check if it had been approved, I wasn’t looking at that status text, just seeing if it will still showing up on the “Manage My Applications” page. I had assumed that on approval or rejection it would be removed from the page.
At this point I was irate. When had it been rejected? Why didn’t I receive an email? Because I hadn’t received an email, how would I know why it was rejected? Again, my mistake.
I was about to send an email to the Apple review team when it suddenly occured to me to check my spam folder. Sure enough, there was the email from Apple letting me know the update had been rejected…on July 14th! A full week before I realised that it was rejected in iTunes Connect! Thank you Gmail, for flagging such a dangerous message.
At least the rejection explanation was clear from Apple. They weren’t happy that I ask the user to enter an email address in order to post to the global leaderboards, but that I didn’t inform the user that their email address would be stored on the server. I get it; it makes sense. I don’t like it when other programs store my personal info without telling me.
What’s frustrating about this is that the last 3 updates have all had the exact same email code in them and none of them were flagged sooner. Additionally, the Dapple Lite 1.3 update was approved with identical code to the Dapple 1.3 update that was rejected. Hooray for consistency!
After figuring this all out, I made the changes that were suggested in Apple’s rejection email and resubmitted the update. So now I’m waiting for the approval process to go through the paces once again.
Oh, one more thing! I discovered that at some point Apple had reset my email address in iTunes Connect to my default Apple ID email address, which is not one I check frequently. If you’re not receiving any notification emails at all from Apple, log into iTunes Connect and check the email address that is set in your account settings.
So, in case you lost track of all the lessons learned here, let’s summarize:
- When you’re checking the status of your updates, make sure you read the status label in iTunes Connect.
- If your app is rejected but you haven’t received an email from Apple, check your spam folder immediately.
- If you can, add emails coming from apple.com to your safe sender list.
- Make sure your email address in your iTunes Connect account is set to something you actually check.
What’s that Oscar Wilde quote about experience? “Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.” I gained a lot of experience this week.
Owen
