Caught in App Store Limbo

A few weeks back I tweeted about a problem I was having in the app store with one of my client's apps. The problem was that our application , BedBug Identifier, was not showing up in the app store , although it had been approved. I checked the normal things, typos, categories, release date and everything was in order. We waited days.

Finally the client got through to someone in developer relations (note: they do not actually have anything to do with the store itself). They gave us a glimmer of hope, indicating that we did not have a developer certificate in place, or a developer provisioning profile. This was simply because I use my own to develop for clients and don't see the need. This wasn't the first client that I did this for but it was worth a try. I casted the magic developer portal incantation and 'presto chango' ... nothing. I called develper relations myself, and basically got a slap on the wrist for not following official protocol. But still no luck, and the client was in a panic since they were at their yearly trade show and really wanted to get the app out the door.

Finally a true hero emerged, the fine folks at Xcellent Creations had done all the design work on the app and had some contacts at apple that were actually helpful. It turns out that the large icon for the app had a compression format that the app store didn't support. Everything in iTunes Connect showed green - go indicators, but still the icon was not valid. So 30 seconds later, I converted the tiff file to jpg , uploaded it to the store and 'presto chango' the app appeared in the store 2 hours later.

Now you would hope that someone at apple would realize that a 15 second convert scrpit could save them and developers all this headache. Or at the very least detect that the file is not supported and kick it back out ~ that is probaly only 10 seconds to write.

So if you app is approved but doesn't show up in the app store. Make sure your TIFF files don't have some compression turned on. Or even better, just make them jpegs to be sure.