Ask HN: What's your experience with the Apple Appstore?

[mostelato]

In a recent post related to the Hey app rejection from the Apple Appstore, John Gruber (Daring Fireball) writes:

"To say that “many developers do not want to speak out for fear of falling afoul of Apple” is an understatement. Almost none do. And one thing I’ve learned this week — mostly via private communication, because, again, they fear speaking out publicly — is that there are a lot of them"

and

"I think if Apple measured developer satisfaction scores on the App Store, the results would be jarring."

I would be interested in hearing these stories. Perhaps Apple needs to hear them too.

Source for article: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/06/19/swisher-app-store-hey

[ajeet_dhaliwal]

I released apps to the App Store in 2010 and 2012 so things have changed a lot since then. I never had major issues but I currently operate a SaaS (Tesults.com) which if it were to get an app would be a login only (no sign up) and may run into similar issues not because we wouldn’t want to pay the fees but because implementing IAP would massively complicate things, we already have a billing/plans model and integrating another system is just overhead and doesn’t help anyone. It is a concern. The whole App Store model can be massively stressful though even if it’s a free app, was so even back then. Sometimes I had critical bug fixes that were blocked due to some other reason but they don’t consider the customers are currently in a worse position by using a buggy app so in balance it would be better to approve but ask for a fix to their issue within say a week or two. A few changes in policy would make the App Store better to use for both developers and users. Web dev by comparison is truly liberating and the freedom is sweet.

[photonios]

Holy crap! I read about Tesults.com on HN about a year ago and a while ago I wanted to try it out. I googled and searched for hours multiple times. I never found it back until this comment right here.

Thank you!

[ajeet_dhaliwal]

Hey thank you! Our seo is terrible, that’s on me to help fix :-) If you need any help with Tesults please send me a message directly.

While we’re talking about the App Store in this thread web seo is it’s on minefield but at least it’s more open. If you use React and don’t think about seo deliberately from the outset things won’t go well as we’ve found out. We’re only recently adding helmet, prerendering and possibly ssr. On Google web search there’s other issues that affect smaller dev teams too. For example if you put in tesults, Google thinks you meant results and automatically show results for results. No one really clicks the ‘did you mean tesults?’ link. Most people did mean to type results and Google’s data shows that so they’re doing what’s best for users but it’s just another of those things that you have to contend with, part of the package :-)

The most shocking discovery has been black hat seo techniques that some sites seem to use that are still successful. Sometimes the ads in the first page results are the only honest thing there, the others are often just unmarked ads. Especially ones that list the best tools for this or that. We’ve been asked to pay regular monthly payments to appear in some of these lists that show up on Google. We’ve refused. Happy to pay for ads that are marked as ads but not to be part of or encourage deception.

Anyway improving seo is on me to sort out and is now a higher priority but up until recently our focus has been to massively improve the product over the last year with customer feedback.

[soulchild37]

It's ok for me, but I am selling standalone offline apps that don't involve servers / SaaS, hence I have no problem giving the 30% cut to Apple.

If you are building a client side iOS app for a SaaS, then tread very carefully.