This short 10 question quiz will try to categorize your political leanings (left liberal, right conservative, centrist, libertarian, or statist). A great conversation starter!
CheckPlease the most downloaded tip calculator on the AppStore is now available for the iPad for $0.99.PocketMoney users recently experienced one of the negative side effects of Apple’s long AppStore review process… which recently happened after users upgraded to iOS 4.0 and installed version 3.0.6 of PocketMoney that among other things fixed some issues related to iOS 4.0, but a very serious bug was also introduced in 3.0.6.
This bug that caused transactions to switch accounts is my fault, and version 3.0.6 should have never have been released with this bug, but it was released and now I need to learn from my mistakes.
The mistakes that are in my control can be fixed to a certain extent with the proper testing, and I plan on adding notifications to my applications so I have a way to directly communicate with customers when serious issues happen.
What I don’t have control of is the AppStore review process, and it is something that after 16 years in the software industry I still trying to adapt to. Typically if a serious bug arose in any of my apps on other platforms I’d release a fix immediately and very few users would ever be affected. But, the AppStore’s “review lag” takes a serious bug is turns it into a disaster for not just a few customers, but for multitudes of customers.
Requesting Apple to expedite the process helps, but still isn’t fast enough. It must be immediate. I’m willing to pay $10k or something to Apple to be able to instantly approve updates. Yes, make us send new apps through the review process to make sure they conform with all of Apple’s guidelines, but put updates post-approval process so we can get urgent updates out immediately.
we went through the same thing with Star Wars: Trench Run. We released the first version with a very odd bug to reproduce, and a fair amt if people were able to stumble upon it. It took 3 weeks to get the update approved – THREE WEEKS!!
During which, we got rapped in ratings. Since the fix, we’ve had more 5 star ratings than all other ratings, but we can never get higher than 3.5 because I’d those 3 weeks of bad ratings.
With 2.0 coming out very soon, we did a ton of outside QA that cost us boat loads of $$. What’s crazy is that in a day and age where you can push fixes to customers instantly, we’re force back to 1995 development practices for 2010 technology… It simply does not make sense. Not to mention that apple is a partner with you in this business venture. THAT partner dropped the ball and should be punished accordingly. Ie: if you don’t approve updates within a reasonable time frame, your cut is no longer 30%. So put your money where your mouth is apple, and do a better job!