@manton have some trouble getting the iOS through review at Apple. Their concern is —of course— is someone subscribing outside the AppStore and getting the freely from the AppStore. All is not lost yet, they are reviewing now for the third time.

My question: do you have tips or guidance so I can prove I am an independent developer, not related to micro.blog.

Thanks.

@marc0janssen Sorry you’re having that trouble! The best I can say is just stress to them that this is a third-party app and that the subscriptions are handled by Micro.blog, not you, and that Micro.blog has already gone through this with Apple and we follow the guidelines. If you need to escalate it and have them contact me, that is totally fine too.

@manton downside. It takes 24+ hours per go.

@marc0janssen It’s frustrating. Approving Inkwell 1.0 took a whole month. I think they give way more attention to 1.0 than later updates. I think @cheesemaker hit similar rejections for his app that uses Micro.blog, maybe he has other tips.

@manton @cheesemaker I deal with app distributions every day at work. But this is a big organisation. What I notice.

1. Initial version = ages
2. Updates = way faster
3. TestFlight = usual no problem and fast.

I also see that initial versions for my organisation goes way faster then my personal apps when they are intial.

My guess: they have teams , that handle different levels of interest

@marc0janssen @manton here is what I’ve found for highest success:

1. Have a first use wizard. For some reason this helps them feel like your app is “real”
2. If you require login immediately, make sure the demo account you give them has real, but very generic data
3. If you can give them content without requiring login as your first thing, you’ll have WAY more success
4. If Apple doesn’t like things on the 1.0 review, put them behind feature flags and enable them after review
5. With Inkwell login, we had to pass up an extra flag that removes all of the “create account” headers, etc.

But yeah, 1.0 is a slog. So be willing to ship a less than perfect app to ensure you get through review, and then add everything back after that.

@cheesemaker Thank for your reply, I understand “the trick” with feature-flags, but how to handle the token/subscription with micro.blog. Apple will need a login (with can be a token) but they question about where the subscription are handled and paid for… Or “do I miss the point” here?

@marc0janssen I could see two possible options. The first would be to make an app token they can login with that would bypass everything else and just login with a prepopulated account OR create a special login that’s essentially a hard coded string that you just give to app review and it then puts the app in a different “mode”. Either way, it’s both annoying and who knows if they would object

@cheesemaker thanks for the insight. Third time round they approved the app. 1.0.0 is fine. So we can start roll out 1.1.0 with the rest of the stuff ☺️ thanks Jonathan.