Database Reference
In-Depth Information
doing that stuff this close to release, it may be time to have that career-limiting con-
versation with your manager about slipping the ship date.
The other reason that it's a good idea to get a build approved now is that, should
something go wrong with the approval of the final build, you'll have a backup (the
build that was approved earlier) ready to go live in the app store that may not be perfect,
but will do the job.
Double-Check App Store Readiness
Now is the time to make sure that all the legal stuff like EULAs are in place, that you
have screen capture and marketing copy for the app store entry, and that any attribution
notices are either in the app itself or in the App Store description.
Have a Chat With Your Support Group About Bug Reports
Depending on how you are selling the app (e.g., free with a backend license, directly
sold through the App Store), you can expect to receive your bug reports from many
different channels. They may show up as negative comments in the App Store. They
may come in as calls to the support organization. You can get crash reports via iTunes
Connect. Coordinating all this with the support organization will be complicated, and
probably something they're not used to. In some companies, bug fixing is handled by
a different group than mainline engineering. If so, are there qualified engineers in the
organization that can diagnose and fix bugs in iOS applications?
There may also be some institutional inertia to unstick. Companies used to quarterly
or half-yearly patch releases for their server products may be unaccustomed to the idea
of near-instant releasability of fixes to the customers through app updates. More than
once, we had conversations that started with “but what happens if they're running the
last version of the software?” The idea that you could keep all your customers at the
latest release (or require them to update their apps to fix problems) is very foreign to
most enterprise companies.
Be aware that there's a corollary problem that instant updates can bring, which will be
discussed in
Chapter 8
.
Things to Worry About Two Weeks Before Launch
Hopefully, you now have an approved binary in iTunes Connect, in pending status,
and the code has been frozen for a couple of weeks with no significant bugs against it.
Barring a catastrophic bug showing up in the next two weeks, any new bugs should be
put on backlog for your 1.1 update.
