How was your iPhone developer experience?

Question

Have you developed an app for the iPhone platform, and gone through all the hoops (both legal and technical) to have Apple distribute your app via the AppStore? How was the experience for you? How long did it take to make your completed app available in iTunes? Did you register as yourself, create a company, or use a "DBA" tax ID? Any gotchas to worry about? I found the this link to be helpful, and would like to get similar advice from the StackOverflow crowd.

Answer 1

The app store process I think is pretty good, and has gotten better over time (as far as the mechanics of getting stuff onto it). There used to be some big potential headaches around certificates but I think the tools have those almost all ironed out now to where it's hard to go too far down a wrong path.

You also do not have to repay full price for refunds (nor have you ever nor will you ever), no matter what some people still claim.

A few simple tips:

1) If you plan to sell an app you'll need a bank with a SWIFT code, to accept international payments (even if you plan to only sell in the US).

2) Export restrictions do not apply if you use the keychain only to store authentication information (as for a service of some kind). You have to indicate you use encryption but authentication storage is an exception.

3) Try to test well and keep the app stable. Customers don't like crashes and a crashing app can hold up your submission. Learn how to use and understand the memory profiling tools that are there.

4) Remember that Touch users are a large and growing market, try to accommodate them if you can!

5) Ignore reviews of your product, but do provide some means in your app for people to email you feedback and ALWAYS respond to them, no matter how negative or angry they may be.

Answer 2

if you happen to be in the usa, then its a lot easier for an iphone developer to put their apps online. but if you are not from usa, its a very frustrating experience. especially if you are from a country which does not have its own store.

i happen to be from india and i have spent over 40 days just to ensure my card was charged. i have faxed my docs over 7 times to usa and australia. i must have emailed them over 30 times just to ensure my card was charged.

i must have called their usa telephone number at least 5 times, and not even once did anyon e respond. the answering machine keeps you on hold for over 30 long minutes and you finally have to disconnect coz you cant take it any more ;-)

their official email for dev support - [email protected] has never responded to a single email of mine.

worst thing to happen was i got an email from their australian office telling me my credit card was rejected. this was a big joke as my card has a balance of over 1500 usd and i use it all the time on american sites like amazon and paypal. i confirmed with my card bank hsbc and they said there was no attempt to charge my card

finally after many more phone calls and emails they charged the same card this time around (so its really surprising how it got rejected earlier)

now i am in the second phase - to get a usa ein / tin. i have no clue how much more time apple would take just so that i can start selling my apps on the app store.

and i do not understand what on earth makes apple ask their developers to handle all these things? there are 100 other usa based companies which let u sell stuff online but you are isolated from all this legal crap

the way apple rejects app submissions is ridiculous - the entire blogosphere has written stories of the same. they have no standard rules of rejecting your apps.

apple has to soon change the way its dealing with developers otherwise its not gonna take too much time for some other company to eat into its own innovation. reports suggest android is picking up market share (about 5% right now)

although iphone is way ahead of the rest - trust me, we live in a world today which is fast and least tolerant to such screw ups. it wont take too much time for a google or for a microsoft OR FOR COUPLE OF YOUNG SMART COLLEGE KIDS to roll their own version of the app store and kill apple's app store.

i have been a microsoft developer for the last 8 years, and i have been hearing all sort of crap about microsoft. (some of which perhaps is true). for a change i choose apple coz i sensed a big opportunity on the iphone. but so far its been very disappointing. to me, microsoft has been a thousand times better than apple as far as developer support in india is concerned. no matter what people talk about microsoft, the fact is (based on my own experience in last few months) no company matches microsoft when it comes to supporting their developers. they make it super easy to download and preview their latest sdks, their documentation is TOP CLASS. before the sdk comes in, the documentation is up and live on msdn. they have local groups in virtually every important city in india (mumbai, pune, bangalore, chennai, delhi, etc)

and the worst policy apple has is as a dev, you have to pay 100% refunds. their payments are not on time to devs. i can only hope apple realises that developers hold the key to getting mega bucks in the tech world :-)

Answer 3

I'm a registered, published iPhone developer from Turkey.

As far as the initial registration is concerned, my experience has been similar to Raj's, only worse. It took about 3 months for Apple to approve my membership.

I registered on my employer's behalf (as a company), but Apple decided to give me a personal account instead, which turned out to be great, because I quit my job during the 3 months.

Unfortunately, my employer's address is still on the agreement which I have to accept to be able to publish paid applications. I've been emailing dev support once a week for the past 5 months or so, but they still haven't changed the address. So make sure you get everything right during the application, and plan ahead.

I submitted my first application (a client for a popular Turkish website) to the App Store in January. It was conditionally rejected due to external factors (search wasn't working because it was temporarily blocked on the site).

Fortunately for me, Apple answered all my questions regarding the rejection (and they even suggested that I remove the search functionality until it was fully working, so that my app could be accepted immediately), but I hear this is not the case for most people.

About three weeks ago, search started working again, and I resubmitted my application. It was accepted in 5-6 days, and became the #1 free application in the Turkish App Store on the second day. The first update (v1.1) was also accepted in 5 days.

Answer 4

I thought the submission process was hair-raising and brutal. Seems like it could be better automated. But my app flew through in just 6 days with no problem.