Hi! This is A Minute Of Overpass. My name is Eric and I make apps. Now this week I
wanna talk about "Apple Rejections".
Okay, so I missed last week. I'm really sorry about that. I said I do this every
week and then last week I miss the week. I was having loads of technical trouble
and then I just sort of everything got away from me. So one of
the things over the last few weeks that I really had trouble with is Apple
rejections and yeah if you release apps on Apple, you know Apple rejection
is just a part of life. The only reason it doesn't say death taxes and Apple
rejection is just because it's so new, right? However, if you are an
Apple developer you might have noticed lately that like in the last few months
the approval process has gotten really really short, like it used to be
10 days or 2 weeks or sometimes you were lucky we had
7 days and lately it's been like 1 or 2 days and you know it's kind of
funny because we had a a client project which was for like a trade show event
and I told them that we had to get development done with 2 weeks to spare,
right? I said under no circumstances are we gonna still be
changing things 2 weeks before the event? and of course they argued and
they said yeah but we really need everybody and their dog to
approve it and all this kind of stuff and in Indian I argued and we
released it was like 9 days before the event and I said we'll be lucky
hopefully it'll be ready before the event and of course that Apple
approved it like the very next day, so you know egg on my face but
it's still good to have that buffer. Anyway, you know lately Apple has
been really really good but you know and they've been like releasing my.... we've
been going through a whole another bunch of bubble bath games language game, so
we've been submitting, submitting, submitting and
everything's been going through fine. However, they seem to be picking on
one of my apps so. It's called... it's one of the Italian Bubble Bath which
is a.... with the bubble bath games you know you go through you
the bubbles float up with the words in them, you go through, you pop the bubbles
and it says the word and you learn Italian words along the way. We have a
free version and a pro version. The pro version was approved without any trouble.
the free version like loads of trouble, and if you look at my screen
here, here's the approval process. So you can see
prepare for submission, waiting for review.
The first time through with metadata rejected. Now the reason for that was
because I've told you this a few weeks ago, I think might be in the last
video 2 weeks ago where I said we usually put as many keywords in the
title as we can but sometimes Apple will approve that. So the title was Italian
Bubble Bath: Learn Italian and Pop Bubbles and Have Fun Free
Edition. They didn't like the "have fun and free edition" so I shortened it to
Learn Italian and Pop Bubbles and that went through. It was rejected again a
second time because they said if you made a purchase through in-app purchases
it didn't remove the ads right away. It wouldn't do it on the screen that
you're on, it would go to the next one so fair play that was good. In
fact, I've gone through and read published all the other games that had
that defect in it. So that was good that they caught that. You know in-app
purchases are one of the hardest things to test because you can only do it so
many times, right? and then it was rejected the third time.
Putting it through the review process and this time they said we were missing the
restore button. So if you have something that has in-app purchases that's like
non-consumable and somebody buys it, they should be able to restore
it and not have to buy it again.
However, there was a restore button they just didn't know what it was so I went
back to them said no the restore button is right there. So finally it went
through it was ready for sale. However, I had to fix that some of a few
other problems to put the paid version through and they rejected the screenshot
and we just show you the screenshot that they rejected and you see how long it
takes to guess why it was rejected.
Did you see it? Now you might think like when I first saw this "Oh
there's a problem with the screenshot, it must be because we're doing a device picture of
the device inside the thing and everything like that rather than just
showing the screenshot but that wasn't it at all.
The problem was that the device on the screen shot was not an Apple device,
right? If you look at the button, it's not round.
It's not an iPad. It's not an iPhone. So we had to redo the screenshots for that
and again that was just the pro version. The free version still has those
screenshots. And a lot of times with Apple rejection is now if you do an
Apple app, you're going to get rejected sometimes. When it's your own app it's fine.
When it's a client's app they ask load of
questions. they want to have meetings and really just have to resubmit it
again, right? So there's loads of reason, I mean in the past we've been
rejected because we talked about you know this is also available on
Android and that was going through fine and they started rejecting it because
we're not allowed to talk about Android. We've been rejected because they said
our icons all look the same and it looks like we're spamming the market.
We've been rejected because we have like a little bit at the bottom
saying about Overpass, kinda the same as the bottom of this YouTube video like
about Overpass, Overpass does apps and blah blah blah, right? They said that
was too much, so we took that off and stuff like that. So there's all kinds of
reasons why Apple will reject you and but again it is a single reviewer like
if your app gets rejected at once I think in my opinion it's going to be
sort of looked at more closely each and every other time. Other times it just
goes straight through. So anyway, what I thought would be interesting is if in
the comments of this video, if everybody kind of post some of their reasons why
their apps were rejected and you know just because those are the main ones
that I've had. And again, when I release an app, I kinda of like 70%
think it will go through like I think yeah I kind of expected to be rejected
for something stupid like they they don't see the restore button or
something like that which is fine, you know that they're doing their jobs
and I kind of wonder if you know, I think it's better.
I think it's better that you know that the reason they have qualities because they
go through and do that approval process. Google just lets everything go through.
And by the way, like a year ago I loved working with Google much more than
I liked working with Apple. Now it seems like a Google reject something like
they might just suspend it and not say anything to you which is awful
that's happened to me a couple of times whereas Apple will reject it and give
you a reason why and you can go through and make those changes. So anyway,
so that's it for this week. Apple rejections... they're part of life, deal with
it and yeah I hope that's been fine. I'll talk to you next week.
Oh yes and I don't have an outro this week, I mean all the gnarley and the
Snapchat and all that stuff I say at the end of every week,
apparently it's annoying so I'm gonna come up with something new
which is gonna be cool and all that kind of stuff but for now I'll
just hit the main points. Like and subscribe. Follow us on Snapchats. Leave a
comments and then we're going to end with the little girl that comes up just
because we work so hard on that one and here she comes.
See you next week!