You have made your app and now you’re ready for your first release. But you really want to get into the hands of your users yesterday?
Do you know how long it can actually take before your app is in your users hands?
Well, if you’re going through the app store, that very first validation of submitting your app to (either Android or Apple) will potentially take up to two weeks.
You’re either out of luck and have to wait or you can build this into your plan moving forward.
Don’t think you can get it to your users as soon as possible or whenever you think you’re ready. There are guidelines and practices that both (Apple & Android) follow.
Once your developers finish developing the app and they say “alright, we’re ready for a release”, you’ve ticked it off and it’s ready to go. You then need to package and bundle up your app either into an IPA or an APK one for Apple and one for Android respectively. Submit that to both stores and then they’ll go through an automated process, which will scan the app to see if there are any viruses or malicious code, using any deprecated functions etc. Then you will be gated potentially by an actual human who will test your app for the first time.
We see this more on apps submitted to Apple’s App Store rather than Android. For that we must make an Apple account in our software, then the tester can get a username and password and login to the software and test the app. This is to check that app is operating according to the description, doesn’t crash as soon as you get into it, is not extremely slow loading on the very first load, the screenshots match up to what the app is actually doing etc.
These steps if you’re app is being tested by a real life human are as follows:
- Make an Apple or Android account on our software.
- Get a username and password and login.
- App Test
- Check for feedback.
- Launch app if approved.
- Modify app if notified by app checker.
Once it goes through this process, it then gets approved and pushed out to the App Store. You will get notified when this is happening.
If the app checker finds something wrong, you will get an email telling you that you’ve gone against guidelines and the specific section is blah…blah…blah…blah, and you need to fix it. Then you start the process again until it passes and meets their requirements.
When you’re doing your future releases and updates to your software, this generally happens a bit faster. You can then release an update and sometimes within a couple of hours have it available. They don’t have to go through the whole thing from scratch because they can check the differences between version A to version B and determine how much has changed.
But if you are rewriting the entire thing and changing every screen, you’ll probably get a delayed process again.
So just keep in mind that if you wanted to get your app to your users yesterday, you had to release it potentially two weeks ago, not today.
Moreover, remember that it does take some time and your users will get notified automatically in the future whenever there are updates happening. But you can’t tell them that the app will be ready tomorrow, and then start submitting it.
Tell your users your app is available only when it’s available.
