When Publishing Becomes All Consuming

Full disclosure, some of what follows is as much a product of being new to the quirks of each of the various app stores, as well as general frustration for a developer that has spend 3 decades in this business either selling direct, or licensing to other people to deal with the retail side of the business. When we have elected to make things available in the past, we have often used the donation-ware model, simply because it was convenient and easy.

Publishing to the App Store(s)

When the decision was made to finally embrace iOS, Android, and Microsoft Store deployments to consumer markets, the assumption is that they each take earn their % by making things easier for developers. That assumption however, is DEEPLY flawed. The stores do make distribution easier, and they absolutely handle all of the billing overhead that none of us want to handle. However, along the way, they also introduce a massive amount of additional side work that can quickly become over burdensome, to the point that we can totally understand the developers that have eschewed all of the App Stores in favor of side loading wherever possible.

Each store presents it's own set of challenges and gotchas. Even more so than the individual platforms.

Philosophy

One of our challenges, is that of philosophy. We have chosen to tackle every application using platform native languages and tools. That means Apple is in Swift, Android in Kotlin, Web in DHTML/JavaScript, and Windows in c#. It means avoiding cross platform toolkits like the plague, and whenever possible, embracing native technologies.

We thought that would be the hardest part. It has not been. Not even close.

Apple, the walled garden

This has turned out to be the easiest. Some of it is the tight integration of Xcode into the store and Apple's general pro developer approach. While the rules are present, they have been relatively easy to navigate around and get things published, and the communication is good enough, not good, not great, just good enough. We expected a good bit more complex.

Microsoft, the corporate giant

Unsurprisingly, the Microsoft Store is not all that difficult to work with, and its lower fees are nice. The store account process, and really the entire interaction is one gian reminder that Microsoft remains an absolutely massive corporate machine that resembles all the different silos it represents in the workflow of setting up the account and then doing the submission. On the flip-side, fastest approval process from completing a submission until availability.

Ahh, Google, alas...

"If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all".

All I can say is this. Two months after initial submission of our first app to the Play Store, nothing is yet published. Honoring the above statement.