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An Indie Developer’s short tale in overcoming one of MANY problems developing for the macOS platform

Building products for the Apple ecosystem, while a very rewarding experience can be stressful… especially around the dates for the Worldwide Developers Conference. This is when Apple give us Devs just a few months to prepare for the next macOS release, with all the deprecations and outright course changes that come with it.

The situation

I was working solo on the simple cookie manager app for Safari at the time. The initial project was inherited from previously defunct Safari SIMBL plugin which had been abandoned by the original developer.

So, I’m in the midst of a Mac App Store related support nightmare right now…
I uploaded an important update to Cookie yesterday (v5.8.1), and in my haste (it was a long day, and I uploaded it around 2am) it had a receipt checking bug.

Cookie icon

Now, normally this wouldn’t be a problem, as this particular bug should be easily caught in Apple’s own review system. The only real harm is having to upload a fixed binary and wait through the review process again. But, somehow the corrupted build made it through review, and in the the hands of thousands of customers 🙁

Its been a long time coming, and i’ve thought about it often. But seeing Elon Musk delete his companies facebook accounts finally gave me the push I needed to do the same. I deleted fb off my iPhone months ago, and haven’t missed it. Just recently I’ve found myself wasting more time on their platform on my desktop though… something which I don’t like. So after hearing the news on Musk was all I needed to make the leap.

So for the past 3 weeks I have been literally banging my head against a wall with the App Store review process and the cryptic illogical rejection reasons.

App Store review

I am normally quite happy with the App Store review process, and my apps are normally all reviewed and available within 24hrs. However just recently I have had the mis-fortune of feeling the pain many other iOS/macOS devs speak of. Two of my apps; Cookie 5 and Bitcoin Convert have both taken 3 weeks to be approved and ready for sale. Although both for entirely different reasons, both updates were delayed for what seemed like an eternity….

So I’ve been using DuckDuckGo as my default search engine on macOS and iOS now for at least 2 years. I am also at the point, where I find myself having to use Google as a backup search less and less. Chrome was never interesting to me. And I stopped using calendar years ago. I do however still have a personal gmail account which I use sporadically. But mainly only so I don’t get spam in my more important accounts. I tried to setup an Adsense account for Cookie around a year ago. But it kept being cancelled because it was against policie… Analytics was also removed from all my sites a couple of years ago!